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Education – Reports & Policy

School Teacher Supply and Demand in South Africa in 2019 and Beyond

This research report was produced for the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) and the Department of Basic Education (DBE). The study was undertaken to assess demand for, and supply of, teachers in the public service, in order to better inform teacher training policy.

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March 13, 2022 By: Servaas van der Berg, Martin Gustafsson, and Cobus Burger PDF

Learner flows through schools: Using high quality administrative data to understand education system performance

The report analyses school flows, repetition, and dropout using a novel analysis of school-based assessments, and how well these predict future performance and learner flows. An important finding is that the high repetition and dropout rates in high schools imply an internal efficiency rate of only 49% (measured in terms of the years of enrolment in high school for every matric pass).

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September 17, 2021 By: Servaas van der Berg, Chris van Wyk, Rebecca Selkirk, and Heleen Hofmeyr PDF

Using international comparisons to inform debates on salaries for publicly paid educators in South Africa

This brief replicates UNESCO’s calculations, to determine whether South African teachers’ wages are comparable with those in Denmark. The level of teacher wages so determined was only USD71, which is similar to Japan and Italy, but even this seems unrealistically high. UNESCO uses purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates for converting teacher pay across countries to dollars – this is where the problem might be. As an alternative strategy to assess the adequacy of teacher pay in international comparison, we use teacher household assets instead of compensation as a proxy for teacher living standards. This results in findings which are considered to be plausible, as South Africa is then comparable with developing countries such as Botswana, Malaysia and Philippines.

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October 1, 2020 By: Tsekere Maponya PDF