THE finding of a government study that government primary teachers are engaged in 37 types of work unrelated to teaching, in addition to their job of teaching, is gravely concerning. This is so because, as the study that the National Primary Education Academy has conducted says, the burden of tasks unrelated to teaching affects the attendance of the teachers in schools, the quality of education and the learning of students. The tasks unrelated to teaching include the preparation of the electoral roll, surveys on birth and death, child surveys, online data entry, feeding information, stipend-related office work, deworming campaigns, eye examinations, measuring the weight and height of students, Vitamin A+ campaigns, surveys on land, farming and sanitation, stocktaking of infrastructure damaged in natural calamities, sapling distribution and the evaluation of allowances for widows and the elderly. A district unit president of the Government Primary School Headteachers’ Association says that the work is related to various ministries such as health and family welfare, local government, rural development and co-operatives, agriculture, social welfare, disaster management and relief and planning. All this holds the teachers from dedicating their time to teaching, classroom activities, co-curricular activities and assessment.
About 87 per cent of the respondents, as the study made public on January 3 says, are engaged in tasks not related to teaching, 90 per cent say that they cannot fully concentrate on classroom teaching after doing the additional chores and 85 per cent say that they cannot take remedial classes for students lagging behind or with underprivileged backgrounds. Such tasks also have psychological impacts on the teachers, often manifesting in fatigue and burnout. Intense emotional disorders, as the study says, plague 93 per cent of the teachers whilst 85 per cent suffer from high personal isolation. What is also worrying is that the number of students has been on a gradual decline for about a decade in most of such schools. Whilst government primary teachers spend an average of 24 hours a week on unrelated tasks, a teacher spends time on unrelated tasks worth Tk 4,116 a month, which comes down to Tk 49,393 a year. The study has concluded by putting forth five recommendations for the government to overcome the situation. Teachers should not be engaged in data collection or administrative tasks, office assistants or digital assistants should be recruited in schools, all office activities should be carried out in one digital portal, mental health and stress management issues for teachers should be addressed and a teaching hour protection policy should be put in place.
The government appears to have finally become the main obstacle to teaching in more than half, which are government-run, of the total primary institutions of an estimated 114,000, an issue which the government must attend to.
