Teacher shortages are the symptom, not the disease
Latin America and the Caribbean will need to incorporate 3.2 million new teachers before 2030 in order to guarantee universal access to education. One million of them will be needed in Primary Education and another 2.2 million in Secondary Education. In 21 countries in the region, it will not be possible to meet demand for primary school teachers before the end of the decade, and in 29 countries the same will happen in secondary education. The shortage is particularly concentrated in early childhood education, secondary education, and in areas requiring greater specialization, such as Mathematics, Science, and foreign languages.
These figures constitute the starting point of the new Regional Teacher Strategy for Latin America and the Caribbean 2025–2030, published by UNESCO following a consultation process involving ministries of education, universities, teacher unions, and civil society organizations from across the region. The document serves both as a snapshot of the tensions currently affecting the teaching profession in Latin America and as a proposal for responding to them over the next five years.
Looking at the figures, we might think that what is needed are more schools of education, more university places, and more initial teacher training programmes. But is that really the case? Perhaps the issue is not only how many teachers are missing, but why it is becoming increasingly difficult to attract new teachers and ensure that those who begin their careers remain in the profession.
The report identifies familiar causes: salaries that are not competitive compared with other professions requiring similar levels of education, long working hours, limited opportunities for professional progression, insufficient social recognition, and limited participation in decisions affecting the teaching profession itself. Added to this is a particularly worrying phenomenon: attrition during the first years of professional practice, precisely the period when many teachers face the greatest demands while receiving the least support.
The shortage is not evenly distributed either. Schools located in vulnerable environments, rural areas, and certain subject specializations face greater difficulties in attracting and retaining qualified teachers. In the places where educational needs are greatest, it is often also more difficult to find experienced and stable teachers.
For this reason, UNESCO avoids interpreting the teacher deficit as a simple supply problem. The missing 3.2 million teachers are the most visible manifestation of a broader and less quantifiable phenomenon: the progressive loss of attractiveness of the teaching profession. The shortage is not the disease. It is one of its most obvious symptoms.
From training teachers to building a profession
For decades, much of Latin America’s teacher policy shared the same logic. The objective was to improve training. The conversation revolved around schools of education, university curricula, professional development courses, or the number of training hours received by teachers throughout the year.
UNESCO’s new strategy stops asking how to train better teachers and begins asking how to build better teaching professions. The difference is not insignificant. Training teachers means intervening at a specific moment in a professional trajectory. Building a profession requires looking at the entire journey.
The strategy begins long before the first day at university. It starts with the profession’s own ability to attract talent and inspire vocations among secondary school students. It continues through the mechanisms for admission to teacher education programmes, the quality and rigour of training programmes, and the relationship between universities and the schools where future teachers complete their practicum experiences. Then it extends to induction into schools, support during the first years of practice, opportunities for professional development, access to leadership positions, and the conditions that make it possible to sustain a long and attractive career. It even reaches the end of working life and the possibility of making use of the experience accumulated by veteran teachers.
In a sense, UNESCO proposes that we stop thinking about teachers as workers who periodically receive training and begin to understand them as professionals who develop a career.
This explains the importance given to concepts that are relatively unusual in documents of this kind. Mentoring, for example, occupies a prominent place.
UNESCOS’s report considers the first years of professional practice to be one of the most delicate moments in the entire teaching trajectory and recommends developing induction and support programmes that reduce early attrition and facilitate the transition from university training to everyday work in classrooms. The image of the teacher who closes the classroom door on the first day and learns to teach alone is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
The understanding of continuous professional development also changes. For a long time, a model based on courses, seminars, or cumulative certifications predominated. The strategy revives another idea that has gained increasing prominence in international research over the past decade: professional learning happens above all within schools and alongside other teachers. Collaboration among colleagues, peer classroom observation, professional learning communities, and shared reflection on practice appear here as mechanisms just as important as traditional professional development courses.
It is no coincidence that the document frequently uses the expression “teacher professional learning.” The formulation contains a small conceptual revolution. The teacher ceases to be only the person who teaches and becomes someone who also learns in a permanent, situated, and collective way.
The strategy also incorporates dimensions that until only a few years ago barely appeared in regional education policies. Teacher wellbeing, for example, ceases to be understood as an individual issue and becomes part of the very architecture of the profession. Mental health, administrative workloads, work-life balance, and the existence of positive working environments are beginning to be considered factors directly linked to educational quality and retention within the profession.
Something similar happens with leadership. Traditionally, advancing in a teaching career in many Latin American countries meant progressively leaving the classroom behind in order to take on administrative or management tasks. The strategy proposes broadening this vision and recognising diverse forms of pedagogical leadership within schools themselves: peer coordination, support for novice teachers, curriculum development, or promoting educational innovation processes.
Taken together, all these elements paint a different picture of the profession. The teacher no longer appears merely as someone who masters a subject and transmits it to students, but as a professional who learns, collaborates, leads, supports others, and develops throughout an entire working life.
Perhaps the issue is not only how many teachers are missing, but why it is becoming increasingly difficult to attract new teachers and ensure that those who begin their careers remain in the profession.
The teacher ceases to be an implementer and becomes a protagonist
Beyond training, UNESCO insists on the importance of strengthening teachers’ voice and autonomy as a condition for building more realistic and sustainable policies. The quality of a teacher policy depends not only on what education systems do for their teachers, but also on the place they give them in decision-making processes.
This means involving teachers in debates that for a long time have been decided far from the classroom: curriculum, assessment, pedagogies, continuous professional development, or educational innovation. The daily experience of those who teach thus emerges as a source of professional knowledge, rather than simply the final link in an implementation chain. Because no educational transformation takes root if teachers are reduced to executors of decisions made by others.
Recognising teachers’ voices does not mean leaving every decision in individual hands. It means creating spaces where teachers can deliberate, contribute evidence from their practice, participate in policy design, and assume shared responsibilities. In a region accustomed to educational reforms designed from above and implemented with uneven success in schools, this change is significant. The strategy suggests that strengthening the teaching profession requires more than training and better conditions: it requires trusting teachers as actors capable of thinking about the education system, not merely sustaining it.
Teaching today means much more than teaching a subject
The teaching profession has also changed because schools have changed. Or perhaps, more precisely, because schools today receive demands that only a generation ago were not part of a teacher’s daily work.
UNESCO’s new strategy devotes a large part of its diagnosis to describing this new scenario. Teachers continue to teach Mathematics, Language, or Science, but at the same time they work with more diverse classrooms, more heterogeneous educational trajectories, and social problems that increasingly find their way through the doors of schools.
Inclusion occupies a central place. Latin America remains one of the most unequal regions in the world, and this inequality is reflected in educational opportunities. School systems must respond simultaneously to students from vulnerable environments, rural populations, Indigenous communities, migrant students, and students with disabilities, often within the same classroom.
Added to this are responsibilities that until recently were rarely associated with teaching. Emotional wellbeing, socio-emotional skills, and school coexistence are now part of the daily work of many teachers. The report also reminds us that increasing human mobility resulting from economic, political, or climate crises is changing the composition of classrooms in many countries in the region.
Digital transformation constitutes another example of this expansion of the profession. Interestingly, technology occupies a less central place than one might expect in a document published in the midst of the expansion of educational artificial intelligence. Digital competencies appear integrated within a broader set of capabilities that include critical thinking, citizenship, sustainability, and socio-emotional skills.
All of this forces us to reconsider a widely held idea about the teaching profession. Teaching is still about transmitting knowledge, but it increasingly resembles less and less the relatively well-defined task described by educational policies twenty or thirty years ago. And if the work has changed, it seems reasonable to think that the professions responsible for carrying it out will also need to change.
A strategy for rebuilding the profession
Taken individually, many of UNESCO’s proposals seem familiar: improving initial teacher education, strengthening professional development, offering better working conditions, or raising the social recognition of teachers. The novelty appears when they are viewed together.
Traditionally, teacher policies in the region have tended to address these areas separately. University programmes were reformed, new evaluation systems were designed, or salary improvements were negotiated without there necessarily being a shared idea of the teaching profession that societies wanted to build.
The Regional Teacher Strategy for Latin America and the Caribbean 2025–2030 seeks precisely to connect these pieces. Its proposal is organised around three major axes: training, professionalisation, and working conditions. But the underlying message is another: none of these dimensions functions in isolation.
It is difficult to attract students to education degrees if the profession offers few opportunities for growth. It is equally difficult to retain the best teachers if the first years of practice pass without support or if accumulated experience receives little institutional recognition. Likewise, new pedagogical demands can hardly be sustained if there is not enough time, space, and suitable conditions for continuous professional learning.
For this reason, the document insists on the need to build comprehensive and long-term teacher policies. Initial teacher education must be connected with continuous professional development; school leadership with career progression; evaluation with opportunities for development; wellbeing with retention in the profession.
The strategy also incorporates a rather unusual proposal: opening national dialogues to define what it means to be a teacher in each context and what each society expects from those who teach. Before talking about standards, incentives, or evaluation systems, UNESCO proposes agreeing on a shared vision of the profession and building it with the participation of teachers themselves.
More than a plan for training teachers or filling vacancies, the strategy proposes a broader and probably more difficult task: rebuilding the teaching profession as one of the institutions upon which the educational systems of the region rest. Because no educational reform can go further than the profession responsible for making it possible.
