A Teacher in the Driver’s Seat

What Happens When Good Teachers Can’t Afford to Teach?

In May this year, I was traveling from a grantee meeting in Cape Coast to visit schools in Shama receiving training from Sabre Educationwhen my driver, Pious, mentioned in passing that he used to be a teacher. By the time we sat down for lunch that afternoon, I had stopped thinking of him as my driver entirely.

Pious taught for five years in a low-fee private school. By his own account, he was good at it. His last final year students in Creative Arts all scored “1’ (the highest score for the Basic Education Certificate Examination) Creative Arts, except one student who scored ‘2’. In a system where outcomes at this level of school are often modest at best, these are remarkable numbers. He knew his students, knew his subject, and knew how to make learning stick.

“Teaching is ministry,” he told me over lunch, with a conviction that made it clear this wasn’t a throwaway line. “Teachers provide more than the curriculum. The spiritual aspect, the moral, it’sall inclusive. If you don’t teach them the right thing, someone else will teach them something else.”

He spoke about making history and Religious and Moral Education (RME) lessons come alive through role play and bringing items from home. He knew his students as learners and as  people, their learning abilities, their household situations, even the subtle changes in behavior that might signal something was wrong at home. He was, by every measure, exactly the kind of teacher Ghana’s schools need more of.

So why did he leave?

In 2023, Pious was earning 600 Ghanaian cedis a month. When his school needed someone to drive the school bus, he took the additional responsibility, hoping it would ease the financial pressure. The proprietor added 50 cedis to his salary, he declined to continue and shortly after, a new driver was hired for the same role at 300 cedis a month. The driving job alone paid half of what Pious earned as a teacher doing both. He left the classroom and now works as a contract driver where he earns a bit more.

The cruelty in that arithmetic is hard to sit with, especially when you consider what was lost. Pious left because caring couldn’t pay his bills and not because he lost his passion for kids. “I still go back when they have events,” he said quietly. The school clearly still has a piece of him.

His story is not unique. Across Ghana’s affordable non-state school sector, teachers are routinely paid wages that fall well below what is needed to meet even basic living costs, and in many cases, significantly below the salaries in the public system. These schools serve some of the country’s most under-resourced communities, and yet the people entrusted with educating those children themselves are economically precarious. The result is a quiet, steady haemorrhage of talent out of the classroom.

What struck me most about Pious was his clarity about what good teaching requires. “You need to know your curriculum content,” he said. “You need to know your students. And you need to make learning fun and practical.”

We talk a great deal about teacher training, school improvement, and raising learning outcomes. All those matters, but how do we keep experienced teachers in the classroom? Admittedly, it is difficult to build a sustainable system on a foundation that cannot hold on to the people it trains. When a teacher as committed and effective as Pious finds better economic dignity behind a steering wheel than in a classroom, something is fundamentally broken, and no amount of curriculum reform will fix it on its own.

It would be easy to leave Pious’s story exactly there, a gifted underpaid teacher, doing what he must to get by. Teachers in affordable non-state schools have always earned little; what is there to be done? But that ending only holds if we accept that Pious’s talent has nowhere to go. Looking at the pathway open to him today which is to teach in the public system, he must either quit the job that feeds his family or pay in fees and in time he does not have for the degree that would license him to do the work he has already been doing well for five years. Both are dead ends, so he drives.

Could education systems create structured pathways through which experienced teachers in non-state schools can have their existing competencies assessed and recognized, receive targeted professional development to address identified gaps, and progress toward formal certification and, where appropriate, public-sector opportunities?

I went to Shama to observe how a grantee is building the capacity of school leaders and teachers to improve foundational learning. However, I have not stopped thinking about Pious, and how many classrooms across the continent are quietly missing someone just like him. Perhaps the question for policymakers is not always how we train more teachers, but also how we recognize, develop and retain the capable teachers we already have.