Introduction

The status of teachers is a perennial concern for teachers, their unions, and the education systems in which they work. This is partly because status is elusive in terms of being measured precisely. This is because status involves subjective opinion combined with material elements such as pay, work conditions, and employment processes. Status is more than trust because it is inherently comparative. Teachers are keenly aware that holding the same qualifications or levels of training as other professions does not always buy the same status. A challenge is that teaching is complex work that, to some, can appear deceptively simple (Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009, p.273) and this can lead to overlooking the expertise that goes into teaching and facilitating learning.

A complexity associated with understanding teacher status concerns how it is impacted by structural characteristics within a given society or system. The characteristics include the level of education (that is, whether we are talking about, for example, early childhood education [ECE] or higher education), the gender composition of the workforce, individuals’ access to teaching qualifications, meaningful Continuous Professional Development (CPD), job security, national policy settings, and so on. All of these play out in context-specific or vernacular ways. This Report does not posit that these characteristics are one-directional, rather that they are mutually constituted, or entangled, with teacher status such that status is always in a state of flux, of tension, of complexity. Ultimately, status is the sentiment left as these complex factors play out over time (historically and structurally) and in the moment (in the present). Status is also influenced by intangibles such as trust, respect, recognition of expertise, and so on. Any global report that attempts to untangle and report on status must always confront this problem – status is a historical and contextual artefact as much as it is a perception that groups have of the esteem in which they are held.

These factors are made more complex in the ways that global education systems ‘fold’ the nation out, so that each individual school is part of a national or sub-national system as much as they are understood within a global policy moment that transcends the school itself to incorporate national and global policy realities that play out, often in circuitous ways, within schools and classrooms. An example of this concerns datafication, which emerges from national education systems engaging in global assessments that enable commensuration (rankings, league tables, and so on) which then go on to influence policymaking (and therefore conditions and expectations) at the sub-national and institutional level. This then suggests to a nation’s citizens that their teachers are worthy of admiration or condemnation based on a sense conferred by rankings.

Investigating an elusive concept such as teacher status requires acknowledging these problems. The approach of this report is to tentatively understand status through examining proxies visible within education systems. In particular, pay, conditions, media, and government representations of teachers and how employment and systems themselves are organised are considered proxies of status in that they are iteratively connected to the intangibles of trust, esteem, and status.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the issue of work intensification and the impact on teachers’ wellbeing. Even in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a growing awareness that teacher workloads were becoming unsustainable. This mirrored the growing concern in many professions with the emerging issue of work intensification – many teachers report feeling ‘swamped’ due to external factors, meaning they are in a state of ‘educational triage’ (Youdell, 2004).

In this context, the report prepared by Education International on the status of teachers is a unique opportunity to strengthen insight into the status of teachers around the globe. This Report:

· Involves the perspectives of union organisations that are intimately connected with the interface of national and sub-national education systems with the teaching workforce around issues directly related to status (work, pay, conditions, policies) · Gathers perspectives from multiple countries and multiple organisations across the globe · Incorporates perspectives in an egalitarian way – small unions provide as much insight as larger unions to understand the status of teachers across the globe · Asks questions informed by broader research into the characteristics of teacher status in multiple levels of education