This paper investigates whether teacher strikes affect student achievement at the primary school level in South Africa. A cross-subject analysis with student fixed effects is used to eliminate sources of endogeneity bias at the school and student level. Results indicate that teacher strike...

A recurrent theme of the academic literature and wider public discourse is that free trade is bad for health as it promotes economic inequality and insecurity, polluting the environment and making processed foods more widely available. Such views are also widely promulgated by international...

In this report, we review what we know about learning losses and other schooling impacts in South Africa after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020 and 2021). Four overall trends emerge from existing evidence. First, there have been extensive learning losses in the General Education and...

An almost unnoticed problem in the South African education system is the high rate of grade repetition. In this report, a combination of household and administrative datasets is used to identify patterns in learner repetition and dropout in South African schooling and the costs associated with...

The central focus of this research project was the investigation of causes of weak South African student performance in literacy and numeracy in the Foundation Phase (Grades 1–3). Many South African children complete these grades without being able to read properly in their home-language, with...

This paper describes a rigorous data collection process to find and verify the quality of what could potentially be high-functioning or high-performing schools accessible to the poor in three of South Africa’s nine provinces. A potential sample of ‘outlier’ schools is selected using...

This dissertation considers two factors that are considered critical to disrupting an existing culture of inefficiency in the production of learning in South Africa, namely school leadership and teachers’ unions.This first part of the dissertation positions itself within a growing discourse in...