Also in this issue

Starting Up
• Ugandan Ministries Undertake National HIV/AIDS Policies and Services
• Liberia Uses Innovative Tools to Increase Children's Literacy

Publications
Brinkerhoff, The State and International Development Management: Shifting Tides, Changing Boundaries, and Future Directions

Padian et al., Biomedical Interventions to Prevent HIV Infection: Evidence, Challenges, and Way Forward

Early Grade Reading Assessment Toolkit

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Toward Quality Learning in South African Schools

At first glance, basic education in South Africa appears to be healthy. Student enrollment is high and the primary school completion rate is comparable to those in European countries.

Yet, students are not learning. Analysis of the data from standardized testing indicates that the average South African student, like her peers in most developing countries, would score in the bottom 3% of children tested in a developed country.

The learning achievement gap, like the socioeconomic gap, between communities in South Africa also remains wide, even 15 years after the end of apartheid. As children fall behind, the learning gap widens, and the effort necessary to make it up accumulates.

Students in a school in Limpopo Province conduct an experiment with batteries from an Integrated Education Program (IEP) science workbook. [Photo: Melinda Taylor]

“If an intervention starts in grade 1, it will require only 30 minutes of effort a day to close the learning gap,” said Dr. Luis Crouch, RTI Vice President for Research. “But, if the intervention starts in grade 4, then you’ll be spending two hours a day trying to help the child catch up.” Sustained intervention in the foundational phase of a child’s education is, therefore, crucial to overcoming this historical divide.

Promoting Quality Learning

For more than a decade RTI has been working to help South African schools better serve their students. With funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), RTI has led back-to-back programs to improve classroom instruction and school management in some of South Africa's lowest-performing schools. The ultimate goal of both programs has been to improve student learning, and the programs have delivered.

First, the District Development Support Program (DDSP, 1998–2003) led to a 24% gain over baseline in student performance across literacy and numeracy among third-graders in Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and Northern Cape provinces. Then the Integrated Education Program (IEP, 2003–2009) led to an average 20% gain over baseline across literacy, numeracy, math, and science among third- and sixth-graders in the same provinces. Both projects well exceeded their targets of 13% and 8% gains, respectively.

“The success of DDSP and IEP came from an integrated approach to school improvement by training and supporting teachers as well as those who undergird them, including school principals, management teams, governing bodies, district officials, and the community,” said Melinda Taylor, RTI international education program director and former IEP Chief of Party (COP).

Quality Teaching

Although teacher qualifications and salaries have been rising in South Africa, this has not translated into improved student learning. Teachers continue to lack sufficient knowledge of the content they are supposed to be teaching and of instructional methods that challenge and engage the students. Consequently, the classroom is dominated by teacher “chalk and talk” while pupils carry out routine tasks that involve little writing or higher-order thinking. For example, by grade 6 when students should be doing multistep calculations, many are stuck on one- or two-digit calculations.

IEP trained primary school teachers to maximize time in the classroom for group and paired work by students. [Photo: Melinda Taylor]

Under IEP, RTI worked through three local subcontractors—READ Educational Trust, Link Community Development, and The Molteno Project—to coordinate on-the-job teacher training in the four target provinces.

In order to maximize the impact of the training, IEP employed face-to-face training of master teachers who then cascaded what they learned to their peers in school cluster workshops. Provincial and district Department of Education (DoE) subject advisors facilitated IEP training and joined in visiting master and cascade teachers in their classrooms to review their lesson plans, observe classroom management, and make recommendations for how to better engage students and assess their progress.

“The master teacher training covered a wide range of topics within a limited timeframe,” said current  IEP Technical Manager Saeeda Anis Prew. “School visits by IEP trainers to mentor, monitor, and give constructive feedback were, therefore, critical to help consolidate lessons from the training.”

In Limpopo Province, for example, prior to their participation in IEP, a majority of teachers did not know how to develop lesson plans, which affected the quality of their teaching as well as their ability to cover the curriculum. IEP trainers assisted individual teachers during classroom visits to develop time-on-task targets to help them keep pace with the requirements of the National Curriculum Statement (NCS). IEP training also emphasized more class time spent on student activities—reading, writing, discussing—and less on teacher talk. Following the intervention of IEP, the percentage of teachers in Limpopo who taught according to standards of the NCS increased from 14% to 40%.

Quality Management

A high-performing school requires effective management. IEP strengthened management in participating schools through residential training followed by on-site workshops for school management teams in curriculum management, coaching and mentoring, and teacher professional development, among other modules. School governing body members, which include both parents and teachers, were trained at cluster and school levels on school improvement planning and implementation.

School management teams—including principals, heads of department, and teachers—in Eastern Cape Province receive guidance from IEP trainers on community relations. [Photo: Melinda Taylor]

“Principals, school management teams, and the governing body create the environment in which children learn and teachers teach,” Prew said. “So the management and governance training was important in order to create the basis on which all other improvements to help the schools would ride.”

All IEP training included modules or integration of content on HIV/AIDS prevention and awareness. An important legacy of IEP will be the establishment of policies and action plans through school-based Health Advisory Committees to create emotionally safe schools and communities for children orphaned or made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS.

Two community members in KwaZulu-Natal Province tend a school garden used to supplement the school's feeding scheme. [Photo: Melinda Taylor]

In several provinces, IEP partnered with the Department of Agriculture to create school gardens that supplement the nutritional needs of children at risk. IEP was also able to build relationships with the Department of Home Affairs and the South Africa Social Security Agency to get birth certificates issued for vulnerable and orphaned students and give them access to social welfare grants.

Legacy of Quality

In executing IEP, RTI teamed up with the national DoE, four provincial DoEs, five universities, and 12 South African subcontractors.

“RTI relied heavily upon and built the capacity of these local partners as a strategy for sustaining the best practices of the program,” said Taylor.

An evaluation of the impact of IEP found some of these best practices to be the classroom- and school-level support to teachers and principals, and the introduction of tools to guide instruction and student work, such as student workbooks and common tests.

The South African DoE has institutionalized many of the lessons learned from IEP through its own work, in particular under the Quality Improvement, Development, Support and Upliftment Program (QIDS UP), which seeks to strengthen South Africa’s basic foundations of numeracy, writing, and reading.

More information:
Melinda Taylor, e-mail mtaylor@rti.org