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How do teacher absence and substitute teaching affect secondary students’ achievement? Evidence from France has wider implications
By IOE Editor, on 18 February 2020
By Dr. Asma Benhenda
More than 40 % of teachers take at least one sickness leave every year
Teacher absence is a common issue in many countries. For example, in England and France, more than 40 % of teachers take at least one sickness leave every year (see Figure 1 for France). Teacher absence is even more frequent in disadvantaged areas: almost half of all teachers in disadvantaged areas take sickness leaves.
Figure 1 – Distribution of the number of absence spells per teacher-year
Despite the importance of this phenomenon, little is known about its impact on students. The small amount of literature on this topic shows that the loss in daily teaching quality from teacher absence is on a par with replacing a teacher ranked 50 over 100 in terms of teacher quality with one ranked 80 over 100.
I have looked further in my research. My paper answers the following research questions: when a teacher is absent, how much does it hurt her students’ achievement? How easily do schools manage to mitigate this effect with substitute teachers? How does it differ by substitute teachers’ quality?
One of the most important limitations of the existing literature on teacher absence is that it does not analyse the efficiency of schools’ strategies to cope with this disruptive event by using substitute teachers.Yet more and more public resources are used for this purpose. For example, schools in England spent £1.3 billion on substitute teachers in 2015-16 –a 4 percent increase from 2014-2015.
Finding skilled substitute teachers is a major challenge because of teacher shortage in many developed countries
Furthermore, finding skilled substitute teachers is a major challenge because of teacher shortage in many developed countries. In France for example, almost 15 % of teaching positions remained unfilled in 2016. This number can reach 35 % in some subjects such as mathematics. Consequently, there are not enough substitute teachers, especially in disadvantaged areas. Less than 6 % of absence spells are covered by a substitute teacher in the disadvantaged suburbs of Paris (Creteil region) against more than 45 % in the affluent areas in the south of France (Nice region).
My paper relies on comprehensive administrative French datasets matching each absent secondary school teacher to her substitute teacher, over the 2007-2015 period. Based on the analysis of more than 100,000 teachers and three millions students, I show that teacher absence has a negative impact on student achievement. The loss in daily teaching quality from teacher absence is on a par with replacing a teacher ranked 50 over 100 in terms of teacher quality with one ranked 70 over 100, which is consistent with the very few studies on this question.
A replaced day with a low-quality substitute teacher has no compensating impact.
The fraction of teacher absence time where a substitute is used does not have any compensating effect. However, when I make the distinction by substitute teachers’ quality, I find that one additional replaced day with a high-quality substitute teacher (as opposed to a missed day at school) mitigates up to one-quarter of the impact of nonreplaced days. A replaced day with a low-quality substitute teacher has no compensating impact.
I also investigate whether the impact of non-replaced days depends on the length of the absence spell: I find that the effect of non-replaced days decreases with the length of absence spells. This may be due to alternative compensating strategies put in place by students or parents as absence spells get longer.
Figure 2 – Impact of an additional day of non-replaced absence on student test scores by length of absence spell
Policymakers should give extra attention to Math teachers’ absence and replacement.
Finally, I find that the impact varies significantly by subject: the non-replaced absences of the Math teacher have a larger negative impact than the non-replaced absences of French or History teachers.
This suggests that policymakers should give extra attention to Math teachers’ absence and replacement. As there is already a significant shortage of Math teachers, this brings the Math teacher shortage into even sharper focus.
Figure 3 – Impact of non-replaced days and substitute teachers by teaching subject
