A Comparative Trend Analysis of Changes in Teacher Rate of Absenteeism in South Africa

The aim of this research was to analyze the changes in the rate of teacher absenteeism among South African provinces as a major in-class factor contributing to student performance and effective learning. Time series analysis of exponential smoothing, moving average, and seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average model (SARIMA) were applied to model and assess the designed hypothesis as a major factor for educational advancement using different provincial data input from the Department of Basic Education in South Africa. The performances of all the models were analyzed using statistical indexes: Mean Square Error (MSE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). The overall performance showed that the absence rate increased statistically significantly from 2011 to 2017. Thus, this opinion was held by more than half of the general populace depending on the province type. The findings of this research could assist the management of the basic education department in general, and in schools in particular, to understand the problem of absenteeism and thereby enabling the implementation of effective strategies that can be used to curb the practice.