The Department of Basic Education (DBE)’s Chief Directorate: Strategic Planning, Research and Co-ordination received notification, on 22 June 2015 from the Office of the Minister regarding the invitation received for the Minister to attend and deliver the opening address at the University of Stellenbosch Research on Socio-Economic Policy (ReSEP) on the Quantitative Applications in Education Research Conference 17 to 18 August 2015.
The Conference was chaired by Prof Servaas van der Berg (Stellenbosch University) and the theme for the conference was Quantitative Applications in Education. Prof van der Berg also had the opportunity to present on what we can understand from the Annual National Assessments (ANA) and to indicate the amount of learning taking place in primary grades.
The Conference focused on the importance of data and quantitative research to inform policy and interventions in education. Presentations were delivered by both South African and International researchers on past work in the area of quantitative applications in education and possible future work.
Mr Ntsizwa Vilakazi from the Department of Basic Education’s Chief Directorate: Strategic Planning, Research and Coordination analysed the matric results – in full and the Annual National Assessments across schools and districts in his presentation.
The presentation reflected that in the majority of performance indicators, Black African learners perform much worse than learners of other race groups; and reflected on the the intra-race inequality that exists in learner performance by school socio economic status (SES) and, further, that there is a visible gap in the performance between boy and girl learners for the Black African group in relation to other population groups.
Amongst those who presented were Dr Stephen Taylor (DBE) and Dr Martin Gustafsson (DBE / Stellenbosch University). Dr Taylor focused on measuring the impact of educational interventions and Dr Gustafsson shared light on how we can use geo-co-ordinates of schools to answer difficult education policy questions and to understand internal teacher and learner migrations better.
The Minister of Basic Education, Mrs AM Motshekga,MP, delivered a speech at the ReSEP conference in Stellenbosch on 18 August 2015.
The Minister, in her speech, acknowledged the ReSEP team for their invitation and partnership with the DBE and for the opportunity granted to the education sector to assess our progress, reconfigure implementation and sharpen our plans for the future. She encouraged the work of researchers and their exposure to policy questions and the building of technical capacity and knowledge regarding teaching and learning and emphasised that this work should be broadened. “This will help build an empirical evidence base for our future actions,” she said.
The Minister outlined the relevance of research to policy and stated that we in the education sector need accurate diagnoses of what is wrong and which policies and programmes are working, why are they working and why the are not working?
The Minister emphasised the importance of noting which initiatives have been reviewed that can help in improving our sector. The Minister shared the successes and challenges in basic education and revealed the areas in which collaboration with researchers and other thinking intuitions are needed.
The increase in access to complete primary schooling, improvement of grade completion rates especially among black youths, and the increase in achieving a Bachelor’s Pass are among the successes in basic education. Learner performance regionally and internationally, participation in assessments such as TIMSS, PIRLS and SACMEQ, and equity are amongst the challenges that we still face in basic education.
The ANA can be considered as a challenge in the basic education sector that needs improvement. “We will now provide more guidance to schools on the diagnostic use of ANA in classrooms,” said the Minister.
Ongoing and future collaboration with researchers and thinking intuitions was strongly emphasised by the Minister in order to assist national and provincial governments to analyse data to be channelled into programme operations and design.
The Minister, in her concluding remarks, acknowledged the contribution by the ReSEP team in training some of the DBE officials in the last three years with funding from UNICEF and PSPPD. She also remarked that appropriate interventions are of paramount importance in order to transform the education sector and bring about radical changes.
“As the DBE, we are resolute in our quest to improve quality and efficiency throughout the schooling sector,” she said.
