- Last week the Mail & Guardian leaked the NEEDU 2013 report titled “NEEDU National Report 2013: Teaching and Learning in Rural Primary Schools.” Definitely worth a read – particularly the parts on post-provisioning and union meddling. From a budgetary perspective provinces like the Eastern Cape can only be fixed if the post-provisioning saga gets sorted out first (see Table 10 on page 15). From an instructional leadership perspective the SA education crisis can only be sorted out if principals and HODs (and obviously also teachers) are appointed solely on competence and not union/political affiliation.
- I recently attended a literacy retreat at Mont Fleur with some of SA’s leading literacy experts. A fascinating crash-course in how children learn to read. Most interesting for me was the tension between the two camps where one group believed that structured phonics were necessary and the other that they weren’t. On this note I like this article. Two of the background papers for the Mont Fleur retreat that were of special interest to me were Nick Taylor’s “Thinking, language and learning in initial teacher education” and Lillie Pretorius’ Supporting transition or playing catch-up in Grade 4? Implications for standards in education and training.
- I’ve just finished reading Wayne Hugo and Volker Wedekind’s (2013) article “Six failures of the pedagogic imagination: Bernstein, Beeby and the search for an optimal pedagogy for the poor.” I found it to be thought-provoking and especially liked the stress on zero-pedagogy (which Wayne tells me is actually from Ursula’s research). Basically we can’t talk about what type of teaching is going on if there is no teaching whatsoever (zero pedagogy). Also, I’ll admit I’m quite a fan of stage-theory and loved Beeby’s “The quality of education in developing countries” (see also his chapter “Economist and Educator“
- Dell Foundation report (2013) “Success by numbers: How using data can unlock the potential of South Africa’s R-12 public schooling system“
- New (2015) paper in the Journal of Public Economics by Duflo, Dupas and Kremer: “School governance, teacher incentives and pupil-teacher ratios: experimental evidence from Kenyan primary schools“
- “Presenting simple descriptive statistics from household survey data” (Glewwe & Levin) (PDF).
Nic Spaull 
Hi Nick, what is your take on this? http://learnnow.org/departments/global-learning/in-finlands-schools-less-is-more-2
If you have previously dealt with something similar, kindly direct me to your views. Sincerely, Pieter