2023 Awards Ceremony Highlights | 8 November UNESCO Paris

Global Teacher Prize

A US $1 million award presented to an exceptional teacher who has made an outstanding contribution to their profession.

The Global Teacher Prize serves to underline the importance of educators and the fact that, throughout the world, their efforts deserve to be recognised and celebrated. It seeks to acknowledge the impacts of the very best teachers – not only on their students but on the communities around them.

Why Teachers?

An inadequate education is a major factor behind the social, political, economic and health issues faced by the world today. We believe education has the power to reduce poverty, prejudice and conflict.

Teachers work tirelessly to provide an education for children around the world so the status of teachers is critically important to our global future. Teacher status has a significant impact on recruitment, retention, job satisfaction and performance.

Teacher Status

In 2013, the Varkey Foundation commissioned Populus, the leading research and strategy consultancy, to gather in-depth opinions from 21 countries to explore attitudes about the teaching profession; teachers’ salaries; students’ attitudes towards educators and how participants rated their own education systems.

The results, published as the Varkey Foundation Global Teacher Status Index, formed the first comprehensive attempt to compare the status of teachers across the world.

In many countries, it was clear that the profession’s status had dropped and the findings shocked Sunny Varkey, the Varkey Foundation’s Chairman, whose parents had both been teachers. He founded the Global Teacher Prize as a response with the aim of raising the profession’s profile.