What About The Teachers?

Inclusion will not survive unless we start designing education around the people who deliver it

We talk a great deal about SEN/Inclusion. We talk about children’s rights, learner profiles, reasonable adjustments, and personalised pathways. We talk about what students need, and rightly so. But there is a fundamental imbalance in how inclusion is currently framed, and it is one that threatens the sustainability of the entire system.

We are forgetting the teachers.

Education systems cannot function without them. Inclusive education cannot exist without them. Yet, too often, teachers are treated as an infinite resource: endlessly adaptable, endlessly resilient, endlessly capable of absorbing more responsibility with fewer supports.

This should prompt us to question not teacher commitment, but system design.

Inclusion cannot come at the cost of teacher well-being

There is an uncomfortable truth that we must face: teacher well-being and student well-being are not separate conversations. They are deeply, structurally connected. A dysregulated system produces dysregulated classrooms.

We expect teachers to notice the subtle emotional cues of learners, to identify emerging needs, to co-regulate behaviour, to differentiate in real time, to adapt language, to manage trauma-informed practice, all while meeting academic targets and accountability demands. This requires emotional availability, cognitive space, and physical stamina.

When teachers are exhausted, overwhelmed, or chronically stressed, those human capacities diminish. Not because teachers care less, but because the system has reduced their ability to care well.

We cannot continue to promote student-centred inclusion while ignoring the conditions under which teachers are expected to enact it.

Support does not mean “more”

One of the greatest misconceptions in education reform is that improvement comes from adding: more strategies, more documentation, more training, more initiatives. Teachers are drowning not in ignorance, but in accumulation.

Supporting teachers to be inclusive does not mean giving them another checklist or another policy to comply with. It means removing barriers so that inclusive practices become possible within existing roles, not additional ones.

This requires hard questions at leadership and system level:

• What can be simplified?
• What can be removed?
• What expectations are no longer sustainable?
• Where is professional trust being replaced by performative accountability?

Inclusion that relies on teachers working longer hours, masking stress, or sacrificing their health is not inclusion. It assumes unlimited resilience from a workforce that is already stretched.

We are humans teaching humans

Teaching is not a purely technical profession. It is relational, emotional, and deeply human. Teachers do not just deliver content; they read rooms, sense shifts, hold emotional space, and respond to what is unsaid as much as what is visible.

This human work is precisely what allows teachers to notice when a child is struggling emotionally, disengaging cognitively, or masking distress. But this sensitivity is fragile. It depends on the teacher’s own well-being.

If teachers are operating in survival mode, these signals are the first things to be missed, not because teachers are careless, but because no one can attend to others when their own nervous system is overwhelmed.

We must stop designing schools across the world as if teachers are machines, and start acknowledging them as people.

Neurodivergent teachers: lived inclusion in practice

One of the most overlooked dimensions of inclusion is the presence of neurodivergent teachers themselves. Many educators are dyslexic, dyspraxic, ADHD, autistic, or otherwise neurodivergent POD — often undiagnosed, often unsupported, often masking daily to survive professional expectations that were never designed for them.

These teachers bring extraordinary strengths: creativity, empathy, pattern recognition, innovation, and deep understanding of difference. Yet school systems frequently undermine them through unnecessary paperwork demands, long meeting durations, time pressures, and ever-changing expectations.

As a neurodivergent former teacher and now educational consultant, I have lived this tension. I have experienced both the power of teaching through a neurodivergent lens, and the cost of doing so in global systems that do not recognise or accommodate it.

When neurodivergent teachers are supported, visible, and valued, they become living proof that difference is not deficit. Their presence sends a powerful message to students: if I can do it, so can you!

But this requires psychological safety. It requires environments where teachers can speak openly about how they work best, where reasonable adjustments apply to staff as well as students, and where inclusion is not performative but embodied.

Inclusion is a leadership responsibility, not an individual burden

Teachers cannot carry inclusion alone. When inclusion is framed as an individual teacher’s competence rather than a collective responsibility, it becomes fragile and inconsistent.

Sustainable inclusion requires leadership that understands:

• that time is a resource, not a luxury;
• that collaboration is essential, not optional;
• that trust matters more than targets;
• and that well-being is a structural issue, not a personal one.

Policies do not create inclusion. People do. But only when the system supports them to do so.

A necessary shift in thinking

If we are serious about inclusion, we must shift the narrative.

Not:
“How do we get teachers to do more?”

But:
“How do we design systems that allow teachers to do this work well — and keep doing it well?”

This shift is not comfortable. It requires confronting workload, accountability, and deeply ingrained beliefs about sacrifice in education. But without it, SEN inclusion will remain aspirational rather than sustainable. According to the Global Report on Teachers by UNESCO (2025), achieving universal primary and secondary education by 2030 will require an estimated 44 million additional teachers worldwide.

 Countries around the world are still struggling to train, recruit and retain enough qualified teachers, highlighting the urgent need to invest in the teaching profession and retain the teachers we already have.

So, what about the teachers?

Without teachers, the education system fails. Without healthy teachers, inclusion fails quietly, through burnout, attrition, and loss of relational capacity.

If we truly believe in inclusion, then teachers must be included.

Not as an afterthought.
Not as a resource to be depleted.
But as human beings whose well-being, voices, and lived experiences matter.

Because inclusive education is not just about supporting children.

It is about building systems where everyone can belong, including all the adults who make learning possible.


By Shona O'Callaghan
 

UNESCO. (2025, May 15). Global report on teachers: Addressing teacher shortages and transforming the profession. UNESCO. https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/global-report-teachers-addressing-teacher-shortages-and-transforming-profession