BENGALURU: Only 2.5 per cent of teachers in government schools were absent without any reason, reveals a study conducted by Azim Premji Foundation on teachers absenteeism in government schools.
The results of the study, which was conducted by collecting samples in August-September 2016, was released in Bengaluru on Wednesday.
In most cases, teachers were not at school due to to one or the other work assigned by the department. Azim Premji Foundation has stated that the objective of the study was to know the ratio of teachers absenteeism in government schools, different reasons for absenteeism and the rate of absence for these different reasons.
“Though the over all absenteeism is 18.9% with 492 absent out of 2,442 teachers taken for observation, it is lesser than many other surveys conducted in the recent past,” the report says. However, the reasons found for teachers absenteeism in government schools are training, official academic work, election duty, census or survey and panchayat meetings.
Longer commute time is also highly associated with absenteeism. The report states that female teachers were less absent when compared with their male counterparts.
What the report says:
Since about 2005, a number of studies have focused on the issue of teacher absenteeism in India and they have highlighted the high rates of absenteeism. They have also focused on the point that around one out of four teachers are absent on any given day in the government school system. This statistic has become a focal point in policy discussions on teacher accountability in the government school system.
The Azim Premji Foundation’s work with the school education system over nearly two decades has suggested that teacher absenteeism is not as central a concern as the dominant narrative suggests.
In order to better understand teacher absenteeism, we undertook a field-level study covering some areas in which the Foundation has an active field presence. The purpose was to identify the extent to which and the reasons why teachers are ‘not present’ in schools. In both our study and other studies, teacher absenteeism, which is understood as absence without reason is much lower than overall teacher absence.
