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...

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...

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...

There are significant lifelong impacts of quality early childhood care and education (ECCE) interventions on children’s health, development, education and future life prospects, but the costs of these services are often cited as a barrier to attending ECCE programmes. With limited state...

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, and the anticipated socio-economic impacts of a hard lockdown, the South African government has leveraged three channels of social protection to protect livelihoods: social insurance, a social assistance programme of grants and localised social relief efforts....

The aim of this study is to use data from three waves of the National Income Dynamics Study (2008, 2010 and 2012) in order to examine and decompose the dynamics of child poverty over the period. The study is specifically aimed at examining the poverty dynamics of children, as they have been...

• Youth unemployment in South Africa is high, differs substantially by race group and is increasing. In 2012, close to two-thirds of young Africans were broadly unemployed. Over the four years prior to this the unemployment rate had increased by almost ten percentage points. • A wage subsidy...

As South African universities experience extremely low graduation rates, academic staff implement a range of interventions, such as tutorial programmes, in order to improve student performance. However, relatively little is known about the impact of such tutorial programmes on students’...