Impact evaluation of Funda Wande in-service teacher coaching intervention: Findings from the first year

Low-resource public schools in South Africa suffer from a lack of (i) access to home-language reading materials and (ii) teacher capacity on how to teach early-grade reading in African languages. In this context, the Funda Wande structured pedagogical intervention provides a complementary bouquet of learner and teacher resources and teacher professional development (in the form of in-class teacher coaching). After one year of implementation, results from a randomized control trial evaluation shows that the programme improves student reading proficiency by 0.17 standard deviation. Learning gains translate to between 20 and 27 per cent of a year’s worth of learning for Grade 2 learners and between 33 and 58 per cent for Grade 1 learners. Encouraging from a policy perspective is that the effects are positive across all sub-tasks that were reliably measured, and that the intervention has positive impacts across the distribution of learners by initial reading proficiency.