Learner Flows Through Schools: Using High Quality Administrative Data to Understand Education System Performance

This report forms a part of a larger project funded by and undertaken on behalf of the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. The report analyses school flows, repetition, and dropout using a novel analysis of school-based assessments, and how well these predict future performance and learner flows. An important finding is that the high repetition and dropout rates in high schools imply an internal efficiency rate of only 49% (measured in terms of the years of enrolment in high school for every matric pass). At this rate, ten learner years at high school is required for every pass. This is because some learners who eventually matriculate only do so after having repeated once or more, but mainly because a large proportion of learners spend some years in high school without ever reaching or passing matric.

Keywords: Education, drop-out, repetition, internal efficiency, inequality, South Africa

JEL Classification: I20, I24, I25

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Van der Berg, Servaas and van Wyk, Chris and Selkirk, Rebecca and Hofmeyr, Heleen, Learner Flows Through Schools: Using High Quality Administrative Data to Understand Education System Performance (August 2021). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4009654 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4009654