Welcome to our weekly blog for Teacher Tapp Ghana!

Every Monday we summarize 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.

Please encourage your colleagues to use the Teacher Tapp app to keep engaged with education even when they’re not teaching. Your responses are also a vital data source that will guide decision-making around best policies and approaches for enhancing the welfare of educators/teachers and ensuring robust educational sector management.

Many more teachers will like to be heard and this can be done through Teacher Tapp. Do share this blog with your colleagues and encourage them to use the download links at the bottom of the page. In the meantime, here are this week’s intriguing findings…

1. The return to school…

A small number of teachers are back in school as of last week, while much larger numbers of SHS and JHS teachers will be returning today.

Teachers that are back in the classroom have a warning for those returning this week. According to our polling, 70% of returned teachers have diagnosed their students as having large or very large gaps in their learning from the closures.

This serves as a valuable reminder for the need to run some formative assessment with your students to identify what you need to focus on in your teaching.

As well as lost learning, mandatory face masks have also been a concern for teachers returning to the classroom. We asked you what aspects of this new policy particularly concern you and were interested to see that there was very little difference in responses between teachers of younger and older students.

These concerns suggest that it might be advisable to spend some time when students return to school explaining to them how to look after and work with their masks in the classroom.

2 . Wanted: smaller classes

Last week we asked you what your ideal class size would be. We’ve asked this question a few times this year, but we wanted to see if COVID-19 has changed your attitudes at all.

Interestingly, it has. Nearly 20% of you now want a class of ’11 – 20′ than did in early March. 15% fewer of you were happy with a class size of ’21 – 30′.

The differences are small, but they suggest that concerns about infection and the need to give students up with so much lost learning have increased interest in smaller class sizes.

3 . Education on the Radio

Last week saw the launch of Ghana Learning Radio, which will broadcast educational content for students as a per a schedule.

The service has been in demand for months due to concerns that Ghana Learning TV is inaccessible to large swathes of students who do not own a television.

However, after the launch of the station, we were surprised to note that nearly 1 in 3 teachers do not believe that their students will be able to access the service.

With such a large number of students unable to access remote learning, the pressure for a return to schools increases even further. Or, perhaps, GES need to consider an approach to education that depends less on technology.