North West Syria: Teachers on strike as one in three teachers working without pay

One in three teachers working in North West Syria have been working without pay for over a year and one in four schools in North West Syria are relying on unpaid teachers according to analysis from the Education Cluster. The analysis shows that more than six thousand teachers in over 320 schools in the North West are not being paid. Teachers teaching 5th to 12th grades are the worst affected.

Learning is a crucial to children and in the North West Syria context teaching is especially difficult and dangerous given the conflict’s effects on children and attacks on schools, a legacy of unsafe learning spaces and the COVID-19 pandemic. The sharp devaluation of the Syrian Pound and related inflation compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, has made poverty in the northwest nearly universal. Struggling to make a living, teachers cannot manage the burden of unpaid teaching. They need to be able to support themselves and their families. Hundreds of teachers had been staging sit-ins since 13 February 2021 to bring attention to this issue. This situation is destabilizing education services leaving children at high risk of further learning loss and the reducing the number of available and qualified teaching professionals as in-service teachers leave their profession seeking paid work.

Without teachers, schools cannot operate. Children in the northwest have suffered a decade of conflict. Children who do not attend school are at greater risk of child marriage, child labour and being recruited and used in conflict. Psychosocial distress is also far more prevalent in out of school children.

The education authority has the primary reasonability to provide education services. Due to an inability to pay some in-service teachers in North West Syria are striking halting and disrupting education and this is expected to increase. The Education Cluster calls on donors to enable teachers to be paid for the important, and at time dangerous, work they do. Children must continue their education and not fall further behind in their learning and teachers should be able to provide for their families’ basic needs.

For more details please contact:

Yuka NAKAMURA
Education Cluster Coordinator
United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)
MENA Regional Office, Gaziantep Outpost, Turkey
[email protected]

Efsun ILHAN
Education Cluster Coordinator
Save the Children
Gaziantep Hub, Syria Response Office
[email protected]