Knowledge on child rights among private and government school teachers, Pokhara, Kaski district

Abstract

Introduction: Children play vital role to the nation’s present and its future. The healthy and educated child of today is the intelligent and active citizen of tomorrow. Hence, the objective of our study was to assess the level of knowledge regarding child rights among teachers, compare the knowledge about child rights in context of private and government school, measure the association between knowledge regarding child rights with selected demographic variables.

Methods: This is a cross-sectional comparative study conducted among 200 school teachers 100 each from four government and three private schools of Pokhara using purposive sampling method. Data was collected from November 1 to December 1, 2021. Structured self-administered questionnaire tool on knowledge regarding child rights was prepared by the researcher herself. The data were collected by self-administered tool by researcher herself within 30 minutes. The quantitative data was analyzed using statistical package for social sciences version 20.0 descriptive statistics and non-parametric test were used for analyzing knowledge and association. P-value of <0.05 was regarded as significant.

Results: Private school teachers had high level of knowledge (68%) while government school teachers had comparatively lower knowledge level (61%) on child rights. There was statistically significant association between knowledge and education level among government school teachers. Sililarly, there was statistically significant association between knowledge and ethnicity, religion and information among private school teachers.

Conclusions: Private school teachers are more knowledgeable about child rights compared to government school teachers which emerges the need for further training to teachers.