6 min readOct 7, 2026 11:56 PM IST First published on: Oct 7, 2026 at 11:56 PM ISTWorld Teachers’ Day is held annually on October 5, exactly a month after we celebrate our teachers and their work. UNESCO commemorates the anniversary of the adoption of the Recommendation concerning the Status of Teachers in 1966, which set the benchmarks regarding the rights and responsibilities of teachers, and standards for their professional preparation and employment. In 2026, while we mark its 60th anniversary, UNESCO brings to our attention the new difficulties that have emerged for teachers from digital technologies, climate change, migration and displacement. These pressures adversely affect teachers’ work and status, which have always been insufficiently valued in all systems. Their lower status is marked by limited professional autonomy and voice in policymaking.UNESCO’s Global Report on Teachers (2023) warned us that teachers are leaving the profession within the first five years of practice, especially at the primary level. The report classified teacher shortage as a pervasive phenomenon, which is a result of several factors including low motivation, sluggish recruitment practices, weak professional preparation, difficult working conditions, and low status. These, in turn, have consequences including increased workloads on the remaining teachers, compromised sense of well-being, and discouragement of prospective teachers. The UNESCO report mentions a shortage of 7.8 million teachers in South Asia, including India.AdvertisementLet us pay attention to two factors, namely teacher motivation and preparation, to understand why teachers are leaving, especially at the primary level. UNESCO lists attractive career pathways with equitable access to professional development as a key to keep teachers motivated. Does it mean that primary school teaching is not considered an attractive pathway?Well, it is not even a pathway because it is one of the most stagnant recruitments in our system. The experience of teaching at the primary level is not counted in the eligibility to become a school principal. Secondary teachers who get appointed as principals make further progress by playing a role in policymaking as they eventually join the bureaucracy. More than 70 years after Independence, we realise that in educational policymaking, school-based decision-making and administration, the wisdom of primary teachers has remained absent. The wisdom and knowledge that they must be gaining by teaching and managing the beginners — which include millions of first-generation learners — simply get lost. The loss is two-fold, as the system loses out on a resource and has to pull on with a large number of teachers whose enthusiasm and aspirations dissipate.Let us turn to the factor of teacher preparation, an Achilles’ heel for the Indian system. It is a connecting point between school and university systems but a weak one. Indian universities have shown persistent reluctance in playing a catalyst role in teacher preparation, especially for the primary level. A small-scale but major breakthrough was made in the 1990s when Delhi University (DU) institutionalised its first-ever four-year integrated professional degree programme of elementary teacher education, namely, Bachelor of Elementary Education (B.El.Ed.). It marked DU’s attempt to locate teacher preparation for elementary level, earlier a constitutional dream, later a commitment, within the ambit of a central university.AdvertisementB.El.Ed. graduates emerged as elementary teachers who drew their identity from being the teachers of children rather than transmitters of a school subject. B.El.Ed. thus became a landmark as its graduates developed professional commitment and resilience to remain in the system and improve it, highlighted by the UNESCO report as an important means to address teacher shortage.Also Read | In Bihar, an experiment for the young that bets on themThis small achievement brought to the fore a dilemma that teacher preparation encapsulates in India. Should we train teachers or educate them? In educational discourse, training has been associated with “tricks of the trade” that the trainees acquire by practising certain actions such as modulation of voice while explaining something. Training emphasises trainee-teachers’ dependence on being “trained” by others in skills and practices, but remains weak on the important principle of autonomous pursuit of knowledge.The emphasis in “teaching” is upon a relationship between the teacher and their students in a carefully developed learning ethos. Teaching demands from the teacher a persistent interest in the learning process of their students, which involves command over knowledge and recognition of the specificities that the students bring with them. The specificities emerge from disparities involving caste, poverty, gender, language, tribal affiliations, and so on. Teaching emphasises the focus on interaction between the minds of a teacher and their students.you may likeApproaching teacher preparation as training has its origins in the colonial system of education centred on the limited purpose of the transmission of textbook content. The roots of training orientation have proved strong, as one notices its presence even in the reports of progressive commissions. The term “teacher education” gained mild popularity as it was used in the recent policy documents, but the system retained the training orientation as the basic features of the programs of teacher preparation remained intact.The recent changes in teacher preparation, made under the framework of NEP 2020, reinforce the colonial format of training. The policy aims at extreme homogenisation by replacing all the teacher education programmes with the Integrated Teacher Education Programme (ITEP), which is a new name for yesteryear’s BA/BSc.-B.Ed. As the university system in India moved to a four-year UG degree programme, the teacher education programmes received a casual and unspecialised treatment. The general higher education prescriptions are being applied to them. Thus, ITEP is wobbling between the tedious and meandering calculations of credits and dual degree arrangements, giving structural priority to content rather than specificities of the learners and teachers’ autonomy.With inadequate preparation and the pressure of new challenges, the teachers find it difficult to meet the demands that teaching a group of young minds poses. They quit early or remain demotivated. No wonder that the UNESCO report does not include India in the list of hopeful countries that could address the teacher shortage by 2030. Honouring a few teachers is not enough. We need to modernise their preparation and take policy-level steps to address the lower status of primary teachers.The writer teaches education at Delhi University