Teachers’ Day: Celebrating and Strengthening Our Early Years Teachers

Add ARY News on GoogleFollow on Google DiscoverIllustration shared by the writerAAResizeEvery year on 5 October, the world celebrates teachers. This year carries particular significance. In 2026, we mark 60 years since the ILO/UNESCO Recommendation concerning the Status of Teachers set out an international commitment to how teachers should be prepared, supported, employed and respected. For me, this anniversary raises a very specific question for Pakistan: what about the teachers who work with our youngest children?

The early years teacher receives children at the beginning of their foundational learning. In the classroom, children learn to listen and speak, play with others, regulate emotions, explore ideas, hold a pencil, enjoy a story, notice numbers and begin to see themselves as learners. These may look like small moments. They are not. If we want stronger foundations for children, we need a stronger professional foundation for the people teaching them.

We should begin by recognising what has already changed. Early childhood education has a much clearer place in Pakistan’s education system than it did a decade or two ago. Pakistan has a national Early Childhood Care and Education curriculum for Grade Pre I, while provinces have developed their own ECCE policies, curricula, standards, teacher guides and implementation arrangements. Public systems have established ECE classrooms and invested in training and classroom resources. Teacher education institutions and universities now offer qualifications and specialisations related to early childhood education and development. Development partners and civil society organisations have also supported ECE provision, teacher learning and community programmes. It has also introduced a wider teaching licence policy. These developments matter. They tell us that the question is no longer whether early childhood education belongs in the education system. The question now is how consistently we build the workforce needed to deliver it well.

A classroom cannot become an ECE classroom simply because we rename it: This is where our next set of decisions matters.

ECE is not simply primary education taught to smaller children. Teaching four- and five-year-olds requires knowledge of child development, play, language, observation, relationships, routines, family engagement and developmentally appropriate assessment. Yet the organisation of this workforce remains uneven. Dedicated ECE posts exist in some places, while elsewhere early years responsibilities may still sit within broader primary teaching arrangements. Pakistan now needs to ask a more precise question: who is an early years teacher, what preparation should that teacher have, and what professional route should lead into the role?

The second issue is professional learning.

We often respond to a quality problem by arranging training. Training matters, but a workshop, degrees, license and qualifications cannot carry the entire burden of changing classroom practice. A teacher returning from training still needs appropriate materials, reasonable working conditions, support from the head teacher, opportunities to observe and discuss practice, and some form of continuing professional learning.

If the system around the teacher remains unchanged, expecting training alone to change teaching is unrealistic.

The third issue is professional recognition.

Pakistan already has National Professional Standards for Teachers. Sindh’s experience with teaching licensing also provides an important policy precedent. The next question is whether early years teaching needs a clearer competency and credentialing route within these existing structures. An early years competency framework would need to address areas that generic teacher standards can easily understate: observing young children, planning through play, supporting language and self regulation, working with families, creating safe and responsive learning environments, and recognising developmental differences without turning the early years classroom into a miniature primary classroom.

Licensing is worth discussing, but it has to solve a problem: A licence or credential should never become another certificate that a teacher collects.

We do not need to build everything from the beginning. There are already provincial policies, curricula, professional standards, university programmes, teacher education structures and emerging licensing mechanisms to work from. Teacher education bodies can define a common set of early years competencies and identify routes through which new and serving teachers can demonstrate them. Universities can align early childhood programmes with these competencies while retaining the depth expected of higher education. Head teachers also need to be part of the equation to support, invest in and promote ECE at school level. Finally, we need to measure more than how many teachers attended a training to what practices have changed and how has it impacted teachers journey of teaching. More so, how far all the initiatives are building on foundational learning agenda of young children.

The 1966 ILO/UNESCO Recommendation was concerned with the status of teachers: their preparation, their working conditions, their professional standing and the support required for them to do their work well. Sixty years later, that conversation remains remarkably relevant. Pakistan has taken important steps in early childhood education. The next stage should focus just as deliberately on the people expected to make those policies and curricula real inside classrooms.

So this Teachers’ Day, my message for early years teachers is simple. We see the work you do.

But appreciation must go further than saying thank you. It must be visible in how we prepare early years teachers, how we support them, how we recognise their expertise and how we build a profession in which they can grow.

If the early years matter, the early years teacher must matter too.

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