Get to know » Schools & their leaders » Are there any barriers to quality teaching?:
Resource constraints
Resources in the PILNA context refer to the infrastructure, teaching materials and teachers available to a school.
School leaders were asked to indicate the extent to which their schools were affected by resource challenges. They could respond with ‘To a large extent’, ‘To a moderate extent’, ‘To a small extent’, or ‘Not at all’. Questions related to both the quantity and quality of resources available to their school.
Students attending schools with resource constraints
Table SLT3.1 shows the percentage of students from PILNA 2021 who had a school leader indicate that their school was experiencing resource constraint ‘To a large extent’ or ‘To a moderate extent’. Note that responses indicating ‘to a small extent’ and ‘not at all’ were left out.
Most students (64%) attended schools where school leaders reported shortages or poor conditions of toilets as a common factor hindering the school’s capacity to provide instruction. This was followed by shortage or inadequacy of instructional materials (e.g. textbooks) (56%) and teacher absenteeism (42%).
At least one out of four students attended schools where school leaders reported shortages of teachers, shortages of qualified teachers, shortages of classrooms, and inadequacy of classrooms as hindering instruction.
What does this mean?
Together, these findings show a theme of insufficient or inadequate resourcing in a substantial number of schools. This is consistent across infrastructure, instruction materials, and teacher availability.
