Guidance Note on Teacher Wellbeing in Emergency Settings

This Guidance Note gives you advice on how to support teacher wellbeing in the five domains of INEE’s (2010) Minimum Standards. It explains how to: 

1. promote mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) for teachers; 
2. create more enabling work environments for teachers; and 
3. enhance teacher voice, agency, and leadership in crises. ​We also offer you resources and tools and examples of these standards in action. 

This INEE Minimum Standards-aligned Guidance Note is an opportunity to put teacher wellbeing at the center of our response and recovery efforts in conflict and crisis affected settings. Not just because an investment in teachers is an investment in children and adolescents, but because at this moment in history teachers deserve our unparalleled attention as an end unto itself. 

Our vision is that the recommendations contained in this Guidance Note set forth and define a benchmark for teacher wellbeing; a standard of care and recognition that every teacher – regardless of where they live and work – should expect from the government or humanitarian architecture or communities that support them. Furthermore, elevating the importance of teacher wellbeing emphasizes the critical role it plays in strengthening humanitarian-development coherence and improving the resiliency of education systems.

The Guidance Note has been contextualization for contexts in Colombia, Kakuma Refugee Camp (Kenya), non-state online universities in Myanmar, and Palestine.

A workshop pack is available to support education actors from different levels of the system together to define and contextualize teacher wellbeing policy and practice priorities.

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