47% Teachers Dodge Classes

Research, conducted by the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD) on teachers’ attitude to school attendance in Public Primary Schools (PPS) in a few selected Districts in the country, indicated that 47 percent of teachers were absent during at least five visits of the research team.

The research, which took place in 30 PPS of these three Districts; Asante Akim North, Birim North and Wa West also pointed out that teacher absenteeism was high at the beginning of the week (24 percent on Monday), declined through mid-week by 12 and 19 percent respectively and then shot up by 40 percent on Friday. This was disclosed in a presentation of the research findings to the media and stakeholders in the education sector by the Programme Officer, Joseph Asunka in Accra. Moreover, the escalating rate of the phenomenon, recorded on Fridays, was frequently ascribed to funeral attendance.

However, professional teachers absented themselves more frequently than non-professional teachers. It was revealed that 57 percent of professional teachers were not present in their classrooms at least once in the week, compared to 36 percent of the non-professional teachers. Conducted between February 25 and March 14, 2008 with support from the Brookings Institution in Washington, the research focused on group discussions with the leadership of School Management Committees (SMCs) and Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs); face-to-face interviews with teachers and head teachers of the sample schools, among others.

Out of the 192 staff population, 162 constituted teachers with 30 of them being head teachers. Again, on the days the research team conducted the interviews in the various schools, two head teachers and 28 teachers were out of post. Further, whereas more than 26 percent of the head teachers were absent at least twice within the week, only 14 percent of the regular teachers were equally absent, attributing head teacher absence to official duties at the education offices. Touching on higher rates of absenteeism among both sexes, male tutors out numbered their female counterparts.

“More than 35 percent of male teachers were absent once in the week of the study whereas less than a 23 percent of female teachers were similarly absent,” presentation stated. Asunka noted that this study was designed to establish the extent to which teacher absenteeism in the country impeded the effectiveness of public service delivery; public resource leakage; questions of accountability at the service provider level and students’ performance assessments. Doing so, he emphasised, would as well “quantify the magnitude of the impact of teacher absenteeism in the education sector, in terms of time and resources”.

Some reasons for teachers’ non-attendance in primary classrooms were outlined as ill health; salary collections and many others. The report indicated also that an overwhelming 87 percent majority of teachers have never received any form of sanctions such as written queries, salary suspension or even verbal warning in the past 12 months. In controlling non-attendance from recurring, the report mentioned that the Ghana Education Service (GES) should consider instituting vacation sandwich programmes to cater for basic school teachers; make health care accessible in remote locations; and redesign the Capitation Grants Scheme (CGS) to remove inefficiencies and give more support to deprived schools.