The Vice President of the National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT), Jacob Anaba, says the Association welcomes the conversation on pairing productivity with salaries.

According to him, should the productivity of teachers be paired with their salaries, they would be earning a lot more than they do now.

He stated that over the years, teachers in the country have proven beyond doubt their high level of productivity in the classrooms as witnessed by Ghana’s top rank in last year’s WAEC West African Schools ranking amidst the many challenges they encounter in the course of their work.

Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express, he noted that should the conversation of productivity come up in the Tripartite Committee meeting where the NAGRAT is demanding Cost of Living Allowances (COLA) from the government, it would be easily proven they deserve even more than they are demanding.

“Our profession, the teaching profession is to develop the human holistically and that includes the heart and the mind. So it involves forming, training and nurturing a holistic development of a human being; intellectual, psychological, emotional and what have you. I don’t know what tape that will be used in measuring it – these parameters – it is very difficult to measure it.

“But the teacher does all this under very strenuous conditions. Most of us are serving in very deprived areas and we’re doing our best. Last year when the results came out, we were applauded because of what we did as teachers. We went to West Africa and we were the best, we topped, Ghana topped because of what we did in the classroom,” he said.

He added that whereas the teachers constitute a significant percentage of the country’s total public sector workforce, they are paid considerably less in comparison with other public sector workers.

Also, their output is not commensurate to the salaries they are given.

“If you look at what the President said at the May Day celebration, he said that the public sector workers were 700,000. The GES has 342,000 that constitute the 700,000. And majority of our members are below the rank of Assistant Director 2, majority of them, about 70% of them.

“The few numbers, that is at the managerial level, they take over 3,000 as their net. And those under take less than 2,000. If you do the computation, we don’t take even 8 billion out of that amount, 31 billion that the President stated as the expenditure that is made for productivity.

“So you’d see that we the teachers, the amount that we are taking from what we get as productivity is very low as compared to what we do in the classroom,” he said.

Jacob Aanaba says he looks forward to the slaaries of teachers being paired with their output.

“We agree very much, and when we want to do that the teacher must be aid more than he’s receiving today. We agree very much, and we’re the people who ask for equal work for equal pay,” he said.