In a country-wide survey conducted by Zamit in the run-up, it has been revealed that as many as 55 per cent of teachers in India struggle with the completion of regular tasks on account of work-related stress and tension. The findings underline the extent to which the school teachers felt weighted down, and constantly so, due to the high degree of pressure that comes with their job. Around 300 teachers across the country participated in the survey.

However, on the other side the same survey had 71 per cent of teachers acknowledging the pivotal role of edtech in managing their work pressure better thereby highlighting the ever-rising importance of edtech for teachers and indeed the wider school ecosystem. Nearly 85 per cent of the teachers affirmed that edtech platforms and tools even helped them improve their teaching and other related skills further cementing their centrality in teachers' professional lives.

The survey covered teachers across a wide spectrum of age groups and experience levels in the country accounting for a broad and inclusive representation of respondents. As regards the level of participation by age group, nearly 40 per cent of the participants belonged to the age bracket of 30-40 years, followed by 25 per cent in the age bracket of 40-50 years and nearly 20 per cent below 30 years. Similarly, in terms of the extent of participation by experience levels, nearly 43 per cent came with an experience of less than 10 years, 36 per cent with experience of 10 to 12 years and 18 per cent with an experience of 20-30 years.

To a specific query on whether they regularly found it hard to perform regular tasks due to psycho-emotional factors such as irritability, anger, sadness, and anxiety, half of the respondents had answered in the affirmative with only a quarter of them responding in the negative. On another query on how emotional factors impinged on their performance, a substantial 47 per cent reported diminishing of performance with only 23 per cent acknowledging that emotional factors led to an improvement in their performance.

“So, on this World Mental Health Day, the message from this survey is loud and clear. A large proportion of school teachers in the country are under perpetual work-related stress which casts a definite shadow on their teaching performance. This in turn has implications for the academic and other school-related performance of young school students. Given the criticality of these early foundational years when young children are nurtured and shaped academically and in all-round development, teachers wrestling with their mental health issues regularly do not bode well for the learning outcomes of the students. And this potentially jeopardises their future career and life as well”, said Mr. Aarul Malaviya, Founder and Director of Zamit.

“On the upside, the survey has also brought to the fore the enormous utility of edtech in the lives and careers of school teachers. If mastered well, edtech does not merely help in improving efficiencies in terms of everyday teaching and other tasks for teachers, it can play an extremely valuable role in helping them better manage their work-related pressures, as attested to by the survey findings. Therefore, it is time that school administration as also the government increasingly focus their attention on the mental health needs of school teachers and strive to find ways and means of how edtech can also help in ameliorating the stress and anxiety of teachers. Deploying edtech in conducting regular professional development programmes and counselling sessions will certainly help in this regard, added Mr. Malaviya.