As part of the Covid-Generation project, Gabrielle Wills examines early grade repetition patterns in South Africa and the effects of early grade repetition on the development of foundational reading skills.

Working Papers
This paper is the first to estimate the impact of minimum wages on worker flows and employment growth rates in a developing country with scarce job opportunities.
RESEP held its 7th annual conference on Quantitative Education Research (QER) from 5-6 September 2023 at STIAS, Stellenbosch University.
Ultimately, learners with disabilities should be accommodated at schools in their neighbourhood, where they should have access to all programmes of support (Screening, Identification, Assessment and Support Policy, 2014).
Tim Köhler provides an overview of the South African labour market during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Teacher Demographic Dividend (TDD) project looks at the challenge of replacing older teachers, but it also offers the opportunity to renew the teaching workforce. The project seeks to understand these challenges and possible windows of opportunity created by this unprecedented demographic change.
Measuring learning outcomes (what learners know and can do) has been a contested terrain for many education systems and researchers, despite universal acknowledgement that assessment plays an important role in curriculum implementation (UNESCO 2013; Darling-Hammond & Wentworth 2010; Department of Education [DoE] 1995). Venkat and Sapire (this volume) refer to the ‘essential circuits’ of education and the
link between the curriculum, teaching practice, and assessment. Our focus is strictly on the Foundation Phase (FP), and where we refer to a specific subject, mathematics is our first concern. This chapter, therefore, only makes passing reference to the major external assessment, the National Senior Certificate (NSC) or matric examination.
On 25 May 2023, the Teacher Demographic Dividend (TDD) project hosted its first Provincial Spotlight Dialogue at The Blades, Pretoria. The dialogue was organised with the aim of receiving feedback on the new research findings in TDD’s national and provincial reports, as well as on a proposed national survey investigating new teacher placement and retention. The dialogue was attended by officials from the Provincial Education Departments (PEDs), Department of Basic Education (DBE), Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) and National and Provincial Treasuries.
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).
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.
Data quality – its accuracy, completeness, reliability, relevance and timeliness – is crucial for proper analysis, administration and policymaking. Data quality was therefore of great…
RESEP is engaged in a 3-year project (2022-24) to track learning losses, repetition, dropout and school completion patterns among school cohorts impacted by COVID-19 disruptions…
A group of 16 RESEP researchers is currently engaged in a 3-year project focusing on the incoming wave of teacher retirements.
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.
RESEP researchers Heleen Hofmeyr and Nic Spaull recently launched the Roots & Shoots study, a longitudinal research study funded by the Mr Price Foundation that aims to track learners from when they first enter school until the end of the Foundation Phase.
RESEP was again privileged to host its annual QER conference at STIAS from 31 August to 1 September 2022. There is much value in bringing together academics, government, NGOs and funders involved in education improvement in South Africa. Two days of new research, engaging panels and critical questioning reminded us of how much work there is to be done, while also revealing the advancement in collaboration that has been made across research and government work.
Three international testing programmes, including PIRLS, point to educational quality improvements in South Africa during the period 2002 to 2019. The gains were substantial, relative to the steepness of improvements seen in other countries. What lay behind these trends? National education quality trends are not easy to explain, and this is seldom attempted in a systematic manner.
An emerging interdisciplinary literature explores how kinship practices affect household resource allocation through efficiency of production and consumption. This paper focuses on a key gender norm – how a resource transfer to households affects school drop out of girls relative to boys, under different kinship practices.
By examining Grade 5 mathematics performance, this paper primarily investigates how learner performance for selected sub-samples relates to and is affected by, a select set of standard covariates
A recent RESEP report, Learning Losses from COVID-19 in the Western Cape has received significant media attention, including features in Rapport, CityPress, SABC, News24, eNCA & Newzroom Africa.