Teachers treated for depression – Unions

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Fiji Teachers Union members at a recent AGM at Rishikul College. Picture: JONA KONATACI/FT FILE

OVERCROWDED classrooms resulted in 561 teachers being medically treated for depression and hypertension last year, claims two teacher unions.

Of this number, 82 had to be sent for further treatment abroad.

This was the claim made by the Fiji Teachers Union (FTU) and the Fijian Teachers Association (FTA) in response to queries from this newspaper about student-teacher ratio in schools around the country.

The FTU claims it had to send 21 of its members for treatment overseas and 78 were treated locally while the FTA sent 61 teachers overseas for treatment and 401 were treated locally.

FTU general-secretary Agni Deo Singh said the main cause of this was overworking.

“Overcrowding in the urban schools and overly large classes has been a matter of serious concern to the union for many years now,” Mr Singh said.

“A teacher teaching more than 40 students has to prepare lesson plans and programs, go through the curriculum, teaching, marking exercises and preparing exam papers and marking continuous assessments and preparing all progress reports.

“A language teacher has to mark 40 essays and that person has to read it all — that is what is required.”

Mr Singh claimed teaching was no longer a choice profession because of how teachers were treated.

“The policies that are now being implemented are not very friendly to teachers whether it is a transfer policy or the disciplinary policy.”

According to the Education Ministry’s website, statistics show that there are 148,048 students enrolled in 737 primary school and 66,127 students enrolled in 173 secondary schools this year.

There are 6121 teachers teaching in primary schools and 5570 teaching in secondary schools.

The two teacher unions said the ideal teacher-student ratio was one teacher to 35 students or less in a single class, one teacher to 22 students in a composite class and one teacher to 25 students for Year 1 and Year 13.

Fijian Teachers Association general-secretary Paula Manumanunitoga said having to teach more than 35 students was taking its toll on teachers.

“All the behavioural teaching strategies that they use in the classroom are ineffective, students can do whatever they want in the class,” he said.

“They refuse to write or do their homework and that builds up stress in the heads of our teachers.

“They make noise and disturb the class which makes teaching ineffective.”

Both the FTU and FTA have called on Government to build more classrooms and appoint more teachers.

“We have been submitting to the ministry to combat the shortage of classrooms,” Mr Singh said.

“Let us get some more teachers, train them and put them in these classrooms.

“We can adopt teaching methods of other countries where we have two teachers in a classroom, one teacher is teaching the whole class and the other teacher checking on the progress of students.”

Meanwhile, questions sent to the Education Ministry last Wednesday on the claims made by both unions remain unanswered when this report went to press.

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