Teacher burnout and job satisfaction: Evidence from Low Cost Surveys in Kenya

• In Event: Improving teacher education programs: Insights for better preparing future teachers

Proposal

Together with the pressure from demographic growth and gains in educational attainment, teacher stress or burnout is one of the reasons why the teaching profession faces shortages in Africa. The COVID-19 pandemic has not helped. One potential response to high burnout is to promote mental health and psychosocial support for teachers and teacher educators. But to do so, we first need a basic diagnostic.

This paper demonstrates how low cost online surveys can help identify burnout issues faced by teachers, providing useful information for policy makers. Such surveys were conducted in Kenya to answer the following questions: (i) How often do teachers and lecturers encounter selected work-related issues at their institution?; (ii) How much does burnout affect their professional output?; (iii) What mechanisms are available in schools or universities support teachers and lecturers deal with work-related burnout?; (iv) How do teachers and lecturers deal at a personal level with burnout?; and finally (v) How may burnout lead to various effects, including depersonalization, reduced personal accomplishment, emotional exhaustion, reduced job satisfaction, and workload?

The online surveys were conducted from November 2022 to January 2023. Email messages were sent to an initial group of teachers inviting them to participate in the survey and encouraging them to share it with colleagues. This abstract focuses on schoolteachers, but the paper also considers university lecturers (in the description below, the focus is on results, but the paper also includes a literature review and theoretical framework). Two-thirds (66.3 percent) of participating teachers were teaching in secondary schools, with one third (33.7 percent) teaching in primary schools. A vast majority of the teachers were working in public schools. The survey did not collect any personal identifier data for confidentiality.

Online surveys are a low-cost approach to exploring burnout levels, some of the factors that may lead to burnout, and its potential implications. At the same time, the approach also has limitations. Data collected though short online surveys are limited in terms the information that they provide. Such surveys are most useful when repeated over time as one-time surveys only provide a snapshot at one point of time. In addition, there is self-selection in who responds to the surveys. For this survey especially, results should be interpreted with some caution since they are based on a sample that may not be statistically representative of all teachers, but the results seem robust and highly intuitive. The results are also instructive and should be of interest to school leaders in Kenya and other institutions interested in identifying mechanisms to support teachers deal with work-related burnout. Very few Ministries implement such surveys to measure teacher well-being. A key aim is to demonstrate that such surveys can be useful for policy makers, especially when they are repeated over time. Furthermore, such surveys can contribute to social dialogues between teacher unions and governments, and may inform protest movements – a key theme for CIES 2024.

Key findings: Burnout levels appear to be high, with implications for well-being and performance

Work-related issues: The shares of teachers reporting work-related issues most of the time or all the time are high. The most common issues reported are low renumeration and slow job progression. Despite a few differences (primary school teachers typically fare slightly less well), results are similar for primary and secondary school teachers and by gender.

Potential effects of burnout: The effect of burnout mentioned most often is a feeling of exhaustion (either physically or emotionally) followed by a sense of skepticism, but other effects such as insomnia, anger, depression, or anxiety as well as illness are also mentioned. Another way to assess the potential effects of burnout is to look at whether individuals are affected in five domains of their life. The share of those affected was at 24.9 percent for feelings of reduced accomplishment, 31.4 percent for depersonalization, 58.6 percent for lack of job satisfaction, 67.0 percent for emotional exhaustion, and 67.3 percent for high workload. In other words, two thirds of teachers were found to experience work-related burnout with regards to workload and emotional exhaustion. Differences by gender tend to be small. Encouragingly, regression analysis suggests that the availability of at least one support mechanism at the school or the use of least one coping mechanism at the personal level seem to be associated with lower burnout levels than otherwise.

Support mechanisms: Only slightly more than half of respondents (55.6 percent ) have at least one support mechanism available to them, the most common being facilitation by the school to spend time away from the institution attending seminars, workshops, or retreats (40.2 percent of teachers). At a personal level, when at risk of burnout, respondents use a range of mechanisms to seek support, including a healthy diet or reaching out to people close to them. However, three in four teachers (74.6 percent) have never or rarely sought professional support. Overall, just over half (53.8 percent) said that they used at least one personal mechanism to avoid work-related burnout.

Takeaways

This paper relies on an online survey to explore burnout among schoolteachers in Kenya. Most teachers report work-related issues such as low renumeration and slow job progression. The potential effects of burnout include reduced personal accomplishment, depersonalization, lack of job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, and a feeling of high workload. Burnout levels are broadly similar in primary and secondary schools and by gender. While half of respondents have at least one support mechanism at work, most types of support mechanisms are not available. At a personal level, when at risk of burnout, respondents use various strategies to cope, including reaching out to people close to them, but few seek professional support. There is however evidence that individuals with support mechanisms at work or through their own connections tend to have lower levels of burnout than individuals without those resources. Improving resources available to teachers for mental health and psychosocial support could help reduce burnout levels as well as some of its potential negative effects.

Author

• Quentin Wodon, UNESCO IICBA