An Analysis of the Secondary School Education System in Mauritius: The Changing Role of Teachers and its Impact on Job Satisfaction

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the Mauritian Education System has turned out to be more and more complex. The teaching profession has become increasingly challenging as teachers have to respond to the ongoing demands of policymakers, administrators, headmasters, students and parents. The teaching profession has evolved into a multi-layered ecosystem which brings constant challenges and new demands as teachers’ progress through different stages of their careers. The enormous change for teachers in teaching, school culture and teaching autonomy (Xia et al., 2022), roles and responsibilities (Sherpa & Bachhar, 2018; Tiwari & Pant, 2017) have change drastically, which have impacted teachers’ job satisfaction. COVID-19 pandemic has painted a new picture of the teaching strategies around the world and has forced teachers to rethink their teaching strategies and adapt to blended learning (Sutarto et al., 2020; Mali & Lim, 2021). Thus, this study depicts the evolution of the secondary education system and examines the job satisfaction of experienced teachers and identifies factors that may influence their job satisfaction over time. It analyses the level of job satisfaction of teachers over the course of their career in Mauritius. The quantitative data has been collected from 126 state secondary school teachers in four educational zones of Mauritius using an adapted version of the Teachers' Job Satisfaction Questionnaire (Lester, 1987). The Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test was used to compare the mean value of general job satisfaction between the beginning and middle of a career and between the middle of a career and the current point in time. It revealed that Teachers' overall satisfaction with their work decreases over the period of time.