Deadline: September 30, 2025
Nominations are open for the GEMS Education Global Teacher Prize 2026. The $1 million prize has been recognising exceptional teachers for a decade and is once again looking for visionary educators who are reinventing learning, tackling local challenges, and changing lives far beyond the classroom.
The Global Teacher Prize serves to underline the importance of educators and the fact that, throughout the world, their efforts deserve to be recognised and celebrated. It seeks to acknowledge the impact of the very best teachers – not only on their students but on the communities around them.
Prize
- A US $1 million award is presented to the winner. The prize money will be paid in equal annual installments over a period of ten years.
Eligibility
- Open to currently working teachers who teach children that are in compulsory schooling or are between the ages of five and eighteen.
- Teachers who teach children age 4+ in an Early Years government-recognised curriculum are also eligible, as are teachers who teach on a part-time basis, and teachers of online courses.
- Teachers must spend at least 10 hours per week teaching children face-to-face, and plan to remain in the teaching profession for the next 5 years.
- The Prize is open to teachers in every kind of school and, subject to local laws, in every country in the world.
Criteria
Applicants for the Global Teacher Prize will be judged on a rigorous set of criteria to identify an extraordinary teacher who has made an outstanding contribution to the profession. The Academy will look for evidence of a combination of:
- Employing effective instructional practices that are replicable and scalable to influence the quality of education globally.
- Employing innovative instructional practices that address the particular challenges of the school, community or country and which have shown sufficient evidence to suggest they could be effective in addressing such challenges in a new way.
- Achieving demonstrable student learning outcomes in the classroom.
- Impact in the community beyond the classroom that provide unique and distinguished models of excellence for the teaching profession and others.
- Helping children become global citizens through providing them with a values-based education that equips them for a world where they will potentially live, work and socialise with people from many different nationalities, cultures and religions.
- Improving the teaching profession through helping to raise the bar of teaching, sharing best practice, and helping colleagues overcome any challenges they face in their school.
- Teacher recognition from governments, national teaching organisations, head-teachers, colleagues, members of the wider community or pupils.
Application
Click here to apply or nominate
For more information, visit Global Teacher Prize.
