Equity , efficiency and the development of South African schools

Identifying the mechanisms for affecting the achievements of successful schools has become a major research focus in South Africa. Large scale descriptive studies have to date failed to make any progress towards this goal, largely because of a lack of data at the school and classroom levels. Small scale studies, on the other hand, which take these latter aspects as the principal focus for their research, have also not made much headway in revealing this secret, in part because they are too small in scale to generalise beyond the very particular circumstances of the respective case. Taylor et al, 2003, 66 The state of knowledge about South African schools has improved significantly since the above conclusions were drawn three years ago. In the intervening years a number of school improvement programmes have come to fruition, while several research initiatives have reported significant findings. This chapter examines the evidence arising from these developments and draws conclusions regarding future directions for both school improvement programmes and research on schooling. Three sources of knowledge are available for researchers investigating school quality: large-scale testing initiatives, school effectiveness studies, and evaluations of school improvement programmes