What is World Teachers’ Day? Why is it important? Why should we celebrate it? We have the answers to all these questions – and more – below!

What is it?

World Teachers’ Day is celebrated every year on the 5th of October in more than 100 countries across the world. It marks the anniversary of the 1996 signing of an ILO/UNESCO document called the ‘Recommendation concerning the Status of Teachers‘. This document sets the international standards for the teaching profession and outlines recommendations for a range of factors including teachers’ rights, responsibilities, salaries, and hours of work. 

The aim of the document is to help work towards ‘an education system that attracts and retains a well-trained, motivated, effective and gender-balanced teaching staff; a system that supports teachers in the classroom, as well as in their continued professional development‘. In short, this document exists to promote the fair treatment of teachers everywhere – a good reason to celebrate!

What is this year’s theme?

The theme of 2019 World Teachers’ Day is ‘Young Teachers: The Future of the Profession’. This year, UNESCO wants to highlight some key facts about the future of teaching which need to be addressed urgently:

• A large percentage of teachers are likely to retire from teaching in the next decade.
• Over 69 million new teachers must join the profession by 2030 in order to replace the retirees and cope with a rising population.
• It is much rarer for teaching to be adopted as a lifelong profession now than ever before. In fact, a large percentage of teachers leave the profession within the first five years.

As acknowledged by UNESCO, it is not an easy time to be (or to become) a teacher. They explain that while teachers used to be some of the most respected and trusted members of our society, they have recently become the most likely scapegoats for underperforming education systems. Meanwhile, their expertise is being questioned more and more, with some people even wondering aloud whether new technology and software will soon become a preferred substitute for real-world human teaching.

Why is this day important?

As humans, we could not live the way we do and would not have made the huge intellectual and technological advances that we have if it wasn’t for teachers passing on our collective knowledge to the younger generations. Here at Get My Grades, our team are extremely grateful for teachers everywhere and (a lot of us having been teachers ourselves) we appreciate hugely the amount of effort that teachers put in on a daily basis to ensure that the next generation is ready for the world. It is important that we protect teachers by making their jobs manageable and by supporting them through difficult periods of social change.

What are we doing to help?

At Get My Grades, we believe that it is essential that teaching again becomes an enjoyable, rewarding profession, with a manageable workload and the recognition that is appropriate for the huge gift teachers give to younger generations (and by extension, the whole world).  

This is one of the reasons we’ve worked so hard to create an online learning platform that helps to make both teaching and learning easier and more accessible for teachers, students, tutors, and parents everywhere. We want to put amazing resources at teachers’ fingertips so they can craft life-changing lessons from them. We want to help to generate data automatically so that teachers can spend their time on the human children in front of them, instead of on counting the digital numbers that have come (in some institutions) to represent these children. 

In line with UNESCO’s 2019 theme for World Teachers’ Day, we want to make sure that new teachers are given the tools they need to maintain a work-life balance – without feeling that these tools are likely to eventually replace them!

To find out more about how you or your school can get access to our platform, read more here.

We hope that everyone is celebrating their own teachers, past and present, on World Teachers’ Day this year!