Our team

Research Fellow

Nic Spaull is currently a Research Fellow at the Research on Socioeconomic Policy (RESEP) group. He has recently returned from Paris where he was a Thomas J Alexander Fellow at the OECD, and before that a Visiting Scholar in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University in the United States. Nic has a PhD in economics and has published numerous journal articles on education, focusing on assessment, accountability, literacy and education policy in South Africa. He is also a Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg and sits on the Joint Advisory Committee of the South African Human Rights Commission. His current research focuses on exceptional township and rural schools in South Africa as part of an ESRC/DFID grant for 2016/17/18. Nic has been involved in a number of research projects for local and international organisations, including the South African Presidency, the Department of Basic Education, UNICEF, the EU, UNESCO and SACMEQ. The most recent of which was the “Binding Constraints in Education” project for the South African Presidency and the EU. He advises numerous NGOs, policy-makers and grant-making bodies, and also regularly updates his website (nicspaull.com) with new research and articles he finds interesting.

Articles

• The Race Between Teacher Wages and the Budget
• Counting the Cost: COVID-19 school closures in South Africa & its impact on children
• Who should go back to school first in South Africa?
• With schools shut, kids go hungry (BD Article)
• Assessing Early Literacy Outcomes in Burkina Faso and Senegal: Using DHS and PASEC to Combine Access and Quality
• Learning to Read and Write for Meaning and Pleasure
• Still Falling at the First Hurdle: Examining Early grade Reading in South Africa
• Equity: A Price Too High to Pay?
• Disseminating your research and accessing funding
• Cost of education
• Hijacked by the urgent we neglect the important (SA Budget 2019)
• Creating reading fluency benchmarks in African languages
• The ‘Martha Effect’: The compounding female advantage in South African higher education
• Disentangling the language effect in South African schools: Measuring the impact of ‘language of assessment’ in grade 3 literacy and numeracy
• Funda Wande: Teaching Reading for Meaning
• Who makes it into PISA? Understanding the impact of PISA sample eligibility using Turkey as a case study (PISA 2003 – PISA 2012)
• The impact of language on learning in primary schools: some preliminary results
• Quantifying educational inequality: an application of Finite Mixture Modeling using TIMSS 2011 / Janet Graaff: Governance of South African No-Fee Schools: preliminary insights to be gained from qualitative and quantitative analysis
• HIV-related discrimination among Grade Six pupils in nine Southern African countries
• Who makes it into PISA? Understanding the impact of sample eligibility using Turkey as a case study (PISA 2003- PISA 2012)
• Investigating the Comprehension Iceberg: Developing empirical benchmarks for early grade reading in agglutinating African languages
• Identifying Binding Constraints in Education
• A Preliminary Analysis of SACMEQ III South Africa
• Poverty & Privilege: Primary School Inequality in South Africa
• “Effective enrolment” – Creating a composite measure of educational access and educational quality to accurately describe education system performance in sub-Saharan Africa.
• The effects of rapidly expanding primary school access on effective learning: The case of Southern and Eastern Africa since 2000
• What do we know about primary teachers’ mathematical content knowledge in South Africa? An analysis of SACMEQ 2007
• Examining oral reading fluency among grade 5 rural English Second Language (ESL) learners in South Africa: An analysis of NEEDU 2013
• Learning to read and reading to learn
• Excessive class sizes in the Foundation Phase
• SA learners perform poorly relative to local and regional standards
• Identifying policy priorities to improve outcomes for poor primary school learners
• Getting reading right: Building firm foundations
• Disentangling the language effect in South African schools: Measuring the impact of ‘language of assessment’ in grade 3 literacy and numeracy
• Exploring relationships between oral reading fluency and reading comprehension amongst English second language readers in South Africa
• Measuring access to learning over a period of increased access to schooling: The case of Southern and Eastern Africa since 2000
• Starting behind and staying behind in South Africa: The case of insurmountable learning deficits in mathematics
• Education Quality in South Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa: An Economic Approach
• Accountability and Capacity in South African Education
• What do we know about primary teachers’ mathematical content knowledge in South Africa? An analysis of SACMEQ 2007
• Examining oral reading fluency among rural Grade 5 English Second Language (ESL) learners in South Africa: An analysis of NEEDU 2013
• Access to What? Creating a Composite Measure of Educational Quantity and Educational Quality for 11 African Countries
• The Gospel according to Banerjee and Duflo
• Poverty & Privilege: Primary School Inequality in South Africa