Abstract

The Federal Government of Nigeria in the National Policy on Education expressed itself emphatically in Section 8, no. 70 (a) that no educational system is capable of rising above the quality of its teachers and thus, teacher education and teachers’ welfare would be given major emphasis in all educational planning and development. As lofty as this policy-statement sound, it stands far away from praxis. Both teacher education and welfare have left much to be desired. This paper considered the effect of stress on teachers’ efficiency in churning out educationally sound and capable outputs from higher citadels of learning. The population for the study consisted all the public and private universities in Ogun State. Four Universities (two public and two private) were purposely selected as sample based on Nigerian University Commission’s approval, sufficient number of years of establishment and geographical locations. Four questions and six hypotheses were formulated in null form. A questionnaire tagged SATE (Stress and Teachers’ Effectiveness) was used to gather the needed data for the study. Findings from the study revealed that teachers from both universities were working under stress, albeit public universities teachers were more prone to stress than their counterparts in private universities. The implication of this is that the government, policy makers as well as the implementers of the policy have only paid lip services to teachers’ welfare and this, of course, has its negative consequential turn on the system of education in Nigeria.

Key words: Efficiency, policy, stress and management.