This section reports on the importance of the use of data in South Africa’s education system – why it matters to parents, learners, and educators, and how providing education officials with the information they need can help improve learner outcomes.
Using Data to Help Learners Succeed with South Africa’s Curriculum
Nishana Parsad needs quick, seamless access to teaching, learning, and assessment data for her province’s nearly 3,100 schools. As Chief Education Specialist for Curriculum in Gauteng, Ms. Parsad uses this data to develop corresponding insights that showcase how each school in her province is mastering…
Data-driven education SA’s success story
Although much of the focus in preceding weeks has been on the recent announcement of the National Senior Certificate (NSC) results, in which the class of 2018 obtained a 78.2% national pass rate, up from 75.1% in 2017, many stories of extraordinary progress being made in South Africa’s basic education system remain untold…
Data and Decisions: Driving Change in South Africa’s School Districts
Ready for a pop quiz? Here are three statements – two true and one false – about the availability and use of education data in South Africa. Can you spot the false one?
- Over 20,000 schools in South Africa have access to detailed data on their students’ learning and needs.
- The data was organized and submitted by the schools themselves – representing information for nearly of learners …
Why data matters in the South Africa education system
There’s little doubt that genuine and sustainable improvements in quality of education can be gained through correct use of educational data. In 2017, the South African department of education achieved an incredible milestone – within five weeks, nearly 20,000 schools had submitted detailed performance data for 9.7 million of the estimated 13 million learners in the country. This data is available in real-time to education officials through the Data Driven Districts (DDD) Dashboard…
Data Drives Innovation in South Africa’s Classrooms
Clarissa Abrahams teaches 114 students, aged eight to nine years, at a large, suburban school in the coastal city of Port Elizabeth, one of the largest cities in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, which has the lowest Gross Domestic Product per capita in the country. On the opposite end of the South Africa, the Limpopo Province is an area where 79 percent of the population lives under the poverty line. Cecilia Mudzanani is the principal at Mukununde, a small multi-grade school in a rural village…