Child-to-Teacher Ratio in Day Care and Teacher Sickness Absenteeism

This paper analyses whether work pressure measured by the child-to-teacher ratio, i.e. the number of children per teacher in an institution, affects teacher absenteeism due to sickness in Danish day-care institutions. We control for individual teacher characteristics like for instance education and family background. Furthermore, we investigate the role of other characteristics at the workplace level like for instance the size of the institution, the proportion of the staff who are trained preschool teachers, family background characteristics of the children in the preschool etc. Our estimation results indicate that for preschool teachers, the risk of becoming long-term ill is positively related to the child-to-teacher ratio for 2005-2006. Furthermore, we look at how the extent of short-term absence is related to the child-to-teacher ratio. Our estimation results indicate that nursery-care teachers’ sickness absence is positively related to their work pressure.