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Are teachers satisfied with their pay? Plus two other findings from Teacher Tapp Ghana!

27 January 2020

Welcome to our weekly blog for Teacher Tapp Ghana!

Every Monday we summarise our most surprising and interesting survey findings from the week before. This weekly blog provides an easy way for you to learn about the experiences and opinions of teachers across Ghana.

We’ve had a great week, with lots of new teachers signing up to use the app. We’re now at nearly 50 daily users! That’s still not enough for us to apply our results to all teachers in Ghana, but we’re getting closer every day.

To help us get there quicker, we need your help. Please send our website to all the teachers you know and encourage them to download the app and start using it. The more teachers we get on there, the better our service will be.

For now, here are the most fascinating findings from the past week….

1 . You want your students to follow in your footsteps…

We found out this week that 86% of you come from homes where neither of your parents attended university.

With 40% of you also telling us that none of your siblings have attended university, there’s a large number of you who are the first in your family to attend tertiary education. Congratulations!

This might also explain your passion for getting your own students to follow in your footsteps and attend university. When we asked what percentage of young people you believe should attend higher education, nearly 70% of you told us that there should be no limits on the number of students who can attend university and any students who are interested should be allowed to go.

2 . You feel your pay is unfair

Last week we learned that 75% have you have previously argued for a higher salary. We now know one of the reasons why: 63% of you do not believe your pay is a fair reflection of how well you perform in your job.

Of that 63%, 55% strongly believe their pay does not match their performance. Research has shown that this belief can lead to feelings of unhappiness and dissatisfaction with a job. This might explain why more than half of you told us that, if you knew what you knew now, you would have trained to work in a profession other than teaching.

We should be careful in interpreting these results. There are many reasons why individuals may wish they had taken another career path. They might feel a different job, for example Accounting, is better suited to their personal interests and talents. They may also be curious about what working in another career is like and express this curiosity through their answer to our questions. The explanation for these results does not need to be low job satisfaction.

Nevertheless, we should take concerns about teachers’ job satisfaction seriously. We’ll be asking more questions on the topic to try and understand more of your feelings on this issue and providing articles that can help you rediscover your love of teaching.

3 . Parents seem satisfied with your performance

Even if it’s not reflected in your pay, parents seem to be happy with your performance. When asked, 84% of you stated that you believe your school is successful in meeting the needs of your parent community.

It is important to remember that this question asked teachers what they believe parent satisfaction with their school to be. We did not ask parents. This means that teachers’ estimates could be inaccurate, especially if parents are polite and do not report their concerns or grievances to a school.

However, some schools clearly have had concerns reported by parents. We know this because you told us there are several aspects of your school that parents would like to change.

The majority of you believe that parents at your school would like to change your school behaviour policies. This pairs up with information we’ve had from teachers and school leaders in Ghana, who have told us that the banning of corporal punishment by the Ghana Education Service has not been popular among parents. Parents may interpret this ban as schools not being strict enough on their children.

We’ve also been told by several teachers that classroom management has been more difficult since the ban on corporal punishment. This is because teachers have not received training in alternative methods of making sure student behaviour is appropriate for learning.

We want to help our users in Ghana with this problem. But we need your help first! Please complete this form to let us know your specific challenges with classroom management. We can then use this information to make sure we’re sharing practical and helpful articles on how to manage your classroom. Together we can help control your classroom and make sure students have more opportunities to learn and achieve.

4. Finally, we know you’re finding our daily readings useful, so here are all of the ones from last week…