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Education

RESEP education research has a strong emphasis on empirical research in a broad range of policy-related issues including teacher knowledge and training, early-childhood outcomes, accountability, socioeconomic status, and school effectiveness. Policy application is one of the central aims of the research.

Reports & Policy Briefs: Education

What rich new education data can tell us

This report leverages data mainly derived from the South African School Administration Management System (SA-SAMS), including a unique longitudinal version of the Data Driven Districts (DDD) data for three provinces as well as the Learner Unit Record Information Tracking System (Lurits) data and National Senior Certificate (matric) examination data to analyse the dynamics of the South African education system in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. It provides a detailed analysis of learner flows, assessment strategies, and teacher dynamics, offering valuable insights for policymakers and educational stakeholders and illustrating how such data can be used in education policy and planning.

December 22, 2023 By: Servaas van der Berg, Chris van Wyk, Martin Gustafsson, Herman Meyer, Abigail Chari, Chloé van Biljon, Adaiah Lilenstein, Rebecca Selkirk & Jessica McCallum PDF

COVID-19 and the South African curriculum policy response

In this note by Ursula Hoadley, she tracks curriculum and assessment policy changes over three years (2020 to 2023) in South Africa in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and school closures. Some changes were made to the national CAPS curriculum documents in the form of trimming content (2020), identifying ‘fundamental’ knowledge (2020), and reviewing subject content (2022).

May 16, 2023 By: Ursula Hoadley PDF

Educational issues and the impact of COVID-19: what education data reveal

COVID-19 caused disruptions to schooling on an unprecedented scale. Emerging evidence indicate sthat these disruptions impacted schooling in South Africa in many ways, from shortened curricula to significant learning losses occurring over the two years of the pandemic (Hoadley, 2020; Ardington,
Wills and Kotze, 2021; Van der Berg et al., 2022). This report constitutes the first attempt at investigating how these outcomes affected broader system performance in terms of key outcomes such as learner flows through the system, matric results, and performance in school-based assessments (SBAs). The report also sheds light on some important other education issues.

February 2, 2023 By: Servaas van der Berg, Chris van Wyk, Rebecca Selkirk, Herman Meyer, Heleen Hofmeyr, Eldridge Moses and Joel Gondwe PDF

COVID-19 disruptions and learning in South Africa: two years of evidence

The evidence discussed in this brief confirms that learning losses in South Africa have been large. Covid-19 has disrupted South African education in significant ways, with enduring impacts for the system (including altered enrolment patterns) and for children’s development.

November 3, 2022 By: Gabrielle Wills & Servaas van der Berg PDF

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.

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).

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.

October 1, 2020 By: Tsekere Maponya PDF

COVID-19 and basic education: Evaluating the initial impact of the return to schooling

This paper describes the partial return to school that occurred during June and July, drawing mainly on the second wave of the NIDSCRAM survey. To what extent was there alignment between the grades that were gazetted to return in June and July and actual school attendance rates by children across the grades? How worried were parents and guardians about sending their children back to school and how did this vary across society?

September 12, 2020 By: Debra Shepherd, Nompumelelo Mohohlwane, Stephen Taylor PDF

A Sector Hanging in the Balance: ECD and Lockdown in South Africa

New evidence suggests that over four months after the closure of early childhood development (ECD) programmes on 18 March 2020, the ECD sector is likely to be operating at less than a quarter of its pre-lockdown levels. Of the 38% of respondents from the new NIDS-CRAM survey reporting that children aged 0-6 in their households had attended ECD programmes before the lockdown in March, only 12% indicated that children had returned to these programmes by mid-July, well after programmes were allowed to reopen

August 12, 2020 By: Gabrielle Wills, Janeli Kotze, Jesal Kika-Mistry PDF