In 2016, RESEP published the “Binding Constraints” report discussing the importance of reading for meaning by grade 3. Three years later, President Cyril Ramaphosa echoes this sentiment in his State of the Nation (SONA) address in 2019.

RESEP researcher Nic Spaull unpacks the implications of the 2019 South African Budget, with a focus on education in particular.

RESEP members often collaborate in a number of ways with the international bodies that oversee policy and service delivery trends across the world. These bodies have included the World Bank, Unicef and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS).

RESEP team members have been acknowledged for highlighting the value of a systems approach to education research.

Dr Nic Spaull, Senior Researcher in the Research on Socioeconomic Policy (RESEP) group in the Department of Economics, spoke about the importance of restoring our malfunctioning primary education system at the presidential roundtable discussions.

RESEP’s most recent policy briefs are now available for download.

A paper by RESEP’s Servaas van der Berg and Heleen Hofmeyr, titled “An incomplete transition – overcoming the legacy of exclusion in South Africa”, is now available on the World Bank’s website.

Servaas van der Berg has recently undertaken some work for the World Bank in Lesotho as part of a Public Expenditure Review.

The “Funda Wande: Teaching Reading for Meaning” project aims to help address the fact that most (58%) South African children don’t read for meaning, by developing a high-quality, free, open-access and SAQA-approved course: the ‘Certificate in Teaching Early Grade Reading.”