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School Development and Support Division

Schooling is key to the quality of skills in every sphere of social and economic life. The challenge of improving schooling and redistributing resources to create a more equitable schooling system in South Africa is beset by a host of complexities which point to some of the reasons why South African schools seem to under-perform relative to the country’s wealth, the proportion of the national budget and donor funds spent on education.

JET’s School Development and Support (SDS) Division brings over 15 years of experience in the field of school improvement to this continuing challenge.

The overall goal of the division is to develop and strengthen the critical skills and competencies required for economic growth and sustainable development by offering learners and their communities’ unique differentiated packages of school development and support.

SDS aims to:

  • Improve learner performance
  • Develop and support schools and their communities to create conducive teaching and learning environments
  • Provide technical and administrative support as well as project management service to partners such as the government, international development agencies, corporates and non governmental organisations on educational support programmes aimed at developing schools and their communities
  • Influence and direct policy formulation through research and available research information

JET’s extensive experience in school development over the past decade has seen it take a direct management role in some of the largest projects in the field. Such interventions have made a significant contribution to improving the quality of education by providing support at national, provincial and district levels as well as in schools and classrooms.

JET’s work in school development serves two important functions: to provide improved services to hundreds of thousands of the country’s poorest learners, and to pilot school improvement approaches which government can then take to scale.

Using past and present research from JET projects as well as external projects evaluated by JET, SDS has done extensive investigation into what works in schools to bring about positive results, and has identified the key challenges to school improvement efforts as being the following:

  Key challenges
At Management Level
  • Non-existence of coherent visioning and strategy.
  • Poor time management- school days and time spent learning.
  • Poor monitoring of curriculum delivery.
  • Deteriorating teacher & learner welfare.
At Teacher Level
  • Incomplete curriculum coverage.
  • Low pitching of teaching.
  • Confusion about teaching methodologies e.g. how to teach reading.
  • Poor teacher content knowledge.
At Learner Level
  • Learner reading, maths and science competencies are low.
  • There is very low frequency and quality of reading exercises.
  • Writing exercises are infrequent and low quality.
  • Learning resources such as text books are under-supplied or –utilised.

 

Key Areas of Intervention

Knowing what the challenges are has led to the identification of the key areas of intervention, and the activities necessary to bring about improvement in each of these areas, as detailed in the table below.

  Key Areas of Intervention Activities required
At Management Level
  • Creating coherent visioning and strategy
  • Using information to plan and advocate school improvement
  • Human Resource Management
  • Allocation of teaching staff, managing teacher and learner absenteeism and time on task
  • Curriculum Management
  • Setting and monitoring curriculum delivery in schools
  • School Review
  • External and school self evaluation
  • Teacher & learner welfare
  • Managing the impact of HIV&AIDS in schools/ dealing with learners in distress
  • Information and Communications Technologies (ICT)
  • ICT planning, resourcing and training.
At Teacher Level
  • Curriculum delivery systems and methodology
  • Implementing common work-schedule and assessments 
  • Introducing effective teaching methods in e.g. reading
  • Improving teacher content knowledge
  • Extended subject training
At Management Level
  • Learner reading, maths and science competence is low
  • See teacher-level focus areas
  • Low frequency and quality of reading exercises
  • Encourage learners to read extended passages in class and at home
  • Writing exercises are infrequent and low quality
  • Ensure that learners are given relevantly pitched extended writing exercises frequently.
  • Learning resources under- supplied or –utilised
  • Provision of minimum reading materials and textbooks

 

JET is currently managing school development programmes involving more than 1600 schools. This work incorporates:

  • programme design
  • project management and all associated activities
  • service provider management
  • training of managers, educators and district officials
  • technical advice on school improvement

Monitoring and evaluation form a critical component of school development projects managed by JET. The organisation’s Evaluation and Research Division is therefore involved in most of the projects that JET is contracted to manage, principally to provide a measure of how learners are benefiting. Assessment of learner performance is a key element, helping to ascertain which factors make a difference in improving the quality of schooling.

Click here for the list of projects

Contact Peter Verbeek at pverbeek@jet.org.za for more information.