Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot Education Unions
5 October World Teachers’ Day Joint Press Release
The Transformation of Education begins with Teachers
Today, Greek and Turkish Cypriot Teachers’ Trade Unions are celebrating 5 October, World Teachers’ Day with 85 Million Teachers all around the World.
During the Covid 19 pandemic, despite all the difficulties and the risks of infection teachers never lost their devotion and enthusiasm to educate their students. In addition, the efforts of the education trade unions during this period were invaluable. Education trade unions and teachers were at the heart of recovery. However, increasing workloads, poor pay, lack of respect and autonomy are still leading to burnout and redundancy in all over the world. The social and economic situation of the globe are also putting great risks on the education quality.
As an integral aspect of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of UN, adopted in 2015, Goal 4 aims to ensure inclusive and equitable education quality and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. In spite of the progress made over the past decades, the international community is falling behind on its commitments.
This September, the UN launched a ‘Transformation Education Summit’ with a view to elevate education to the top of the global political agenda and to mobilize action, ambition, solidarity and solutions to recover pandemic-related learning losses and sow the seeds to transform education in a rapidly changing world.
In this perspective, this year we are celebrating 5 October World Teachers’ Day with the theme of : Transformation of education begins with Teachers.
It is obvious that, education is a process of gaining knowledge, values and morals, and improving skills. It is a process of creating a community, a nation with common understanding of values and targets. It is a process of creating the future. More than 90 % of the world’s children have had their education interrupted by COVID-19 which is the largest disruption of education systems in the history. The global crisis is having a devastating impact on the futures of children and youth worldwide.
Considering the circumstances that put the future generations and our proffession at risk, teachers are at the heart of transformation of education.
With this understanding, we as the Cypriot Teacher Trade Unions, members of the Education International (EI) and the European Trade Union Committee for Education (ETUCE) demand from the goverments for:
- increase in the investment in the quality of public education systems
- guarantee in improving teachers’ status, working conditions and labour rights
- investment in the quality of teacher training and professional development
- trust and respect for teachers and their pedagocical expertise
- involvement of education trade unions in policy making through social dialog.
Education can not wait, our students can not wait! We, teachers can not wait! We must transform education! We, teachers and education trade unions are ready to lead this transformation!
We strongly believe that, joint struggle is of great importance in achieving our targets. With this belief, we will continue to work hard to increase our collaboration with mutual respect and understanding. We will work hard to promote the values of democracy, justice, mutual acceptance and reconciliation. Moreover, we will work hard to reach a peaceful federal solution in our divided country Cyprus.
We are honored to express our solidarity with all teacher trade unions.
DAÜ-SEN, OELMEK, KTOEÖS, POED, KTÖS, OLTEK