The Value of Teachers Around the World: How Professional Capital Matters for the Teaching Profession

Global teacher shortages are tied not only to salary and working conditions but to the status and esteem the profession is afforded in society. Across three cycles of the OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), the share of teachers who feel their profession is valued by society has remained persistently low—in 2024, only 22% of teachers across OECD countries agreed. Education leaders and practitioners express concern that this perception could relate to issues regarding teacher recruitment and retention. Hargreaves and Fullan’s theory of professional capital proposes that human, social, and decisional capital are key levers for teacher esteem, recruitment, and retention, in contrast to the field’s more common focus on individual job satisfaction. Using TALIS 2024 data from roughly 280,000 teachers across 55 education systems, we test this theory with fixed effects logistic regression, asking: within countries, what professional capital factors explain teachers’ views on whether the teaching profession is valued? Models show that human, social, and decisional capital each contribute distinct, largely independent explanatory power, with social capital (collaboration, school climate, and mentoring) as the strongest predictor. We also ask: To what extent do the factors hold after accounting for workplace satisfaction? These effects hold largely independent of teachers’ workplace satisfaction, which is itself partially explained by professional capital. Because professional capital operates through school and system structures rather than individual disposition, it offers policymakers and school leaders concrete, malleable levers for improving the status of the teaching profession.