Education Department

ARK (Education Partnership Group) Strengthen the Education System (ARK)

ARK’s long-term ambition in South Africa is to strengthen the national education system through significant reform and effective policy implementation. They believe the best way to achieve this ambition is to cultivate trusted relationships with provincial education departments and demonstrate their credibility by delivering contextually relevant and evidence-based policy reform and implementation that significantly improves the quality of education in these provinces. EPG plans to work with the National and Provincial Education Departments to strengthen their monitoring, assessment and accountability measures. EPG also want to assist to develop principal qualification requirements, as well as a competency-based assessment framework to substantially enhance the principal appointment process. EPG plans to do reform work on quality and access in the ECD sector.

Public Schools Partnerships Programme (PSP)

PSP as a collaborative programme between government, donors and non-profit school operating partners, aims to achieve a system-wide improvement in the quality of public schools servicing children from poor communities by giving selected government schools the same level of leadership and management flexibility that is accorded to independent schools; harnessing strong managerial resources that currently reside outside of the public education system, and concentrating those resources in underperforming schools and in schools serving marginalise communities and embedding a robust accountability framework so that government is able to track the performance of PSP schools. The group of funding organisations entered into a memorandum of agreement with the Western Cape Education Department to pilot “Collaboration Schools”, that will strengthen the quality of public schools, demonstrate effective models public-schools improvement, strengthen public school governance models, develop educators, and implement interventions to improve the quality of public education for learners from the poorest communities in the Western Cape.

For more information refer to https://dgmt.co.za/tag/public-school-partnership/.

Systemic Diagnostic Assessments: RESEP

RESEP is a group of researchers in the Department of Economics at Stellenbosch University with a well-established track record in researching the economics of education and the quantitative analysis of education data. They have supported the Western Cape Education Department to analyse the loss of learning and other consequences for learning due to the loss of schooling days during COVID19.

For more information refer to https://resep.sun.ac.za/.