Impact Evaluation of Education Quality Improvement Programme in Tanzania: Endline Quantitative Technical Report,

The pattern of modest decline in the learning disparity for Kiswahili by home poverty status is also visible in Table 6. By endline, pupils from poorer homes are still significantly more likely to be achieving at the bottom performance level, and less likely to be achieving at the top performance level, than their richer peers, but the gaps between the groups have narrowed over time.

Table 6: Proportion of pupils in bottom and top performance bands for Kiswahili and maths at baseline, midline, and endline by poverty status (%) (trends in programme areas)

Sources: Evaluation baseline, midline, and endline surveys (Standard 3 pupil tests). Notes: (1) Asterisks indicate statistical significance levels: *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1.

For maths, the growth in performance disparity by economic status is also shown in Table 6 by the significant difference in the proportion of pupils from richer backgrounds who are achieving at the top skills level (11%), compared to the share from poorer backgrounds (7%), by endline. Prior to endline, there were no significant differences in the share of pupils achieving in the bottom and top bands based on poverty status.

One of the potential reasons for the gaps found in achievement by economic status is pupil absence. Data collected at endline, based on the first three months of 2018, show that pupils from poorer backgrounds are absent significantly more often than their peers from richer homes (see Chapter 7). Being absent from school means missing lessons, and thus being more susceptible to falling behind in acquiring the expected skills. This is particularly critical in maths, where skills often build on each other. Pupils living further from school are also found to be absent significantly more often than their peers living closer to school. To the extent that living more remotely is correlated with poverty this may also help to explain poverty gaps in learning. Although, overall, pupil absence rates from school have fallen slightly since baseline, they are still high with nearly 30% of pupils absent on the day of the survey (Table 3).

Another issue related to household poverty is hunger. A large majority of pupils arrive at school each day without having eaten anything, and this situation has worsened to some extent in the last two years (see Section 3.2.1). The prevalence of school feeding programmes is still very low, at 10%, so hunger may well be having a detrimental effect on pupils’ ability to concentrate and learn effectively during lessons. The other negative change in pupils’ economic situation over the last two years, noted earlier, is a steep rise in the prevalence of pupils working outside the household. This may mean that pupils are more tired and find it more difficult to concentrate at school, and it may also reduce the amount of time during which additional support to education can be provided at home.

Seeking to reduce pupil absence from school and hunger are not explicit targets of the EQUIP-T programme46, but some of the structures created under community-linked components of EQUIP-

46 These are not indicators in the programme logframe, and they are not tracked during the annual monitoring surveys.

T, particularly PTPs and JUU clubs, have focused part of their time and resources on tackling these barriers (see Chapters 6 and 7).

Finally, it is important to highlight that pupils’ home language and poverty status are correlated with each other as well as with other potential indicators of learning disadvantage such as living far from school, not eating food in the morning and working outside the household. This means that part of the poverty learning gap, for example, may be related to other background factors. While establishing the relative causes of poorer learning outcomes is beyond the scope of this evaluation, simple regression analysis of learning outcomes against a variety of background factors has been carried out. The results are reported in Chapter 7, and these show that home language is significantly and independently correlated with pupil learning – that is pupils who don’t speak Kiswahili as their native language are more likely to have lower performance in both maths and Kiswahili skills. Poverty status, however, was only found to have a negative but weakly significant association with the proportion of pupils in the bottom performance band for Kiswahili but not with other measures of learning achievement once other background characteristics were controlled for.

3.7 Summary of findings on pupil learning

3.7.1 Impact results

After four years of EQUIP-T programme interventions there is strong evidence that the programme has had a positive impact on pupil learning in Kiswahili and in maths. The programme has helped pupils with both weaker and stronger skills in both subjects, and, as a result, has also had a positive impact on average scores.

The pattern of EQUIP-T impact on early grade learning achievement over time is consistent with the staged implementation of the teacher performance component of EQUIP-T the set of interventions that are most closely related to pupil learning. The EQUIP-T teacher in-service training has high participation rates among early grade teachers, and the school-level component has been implemented broadly as intended. Teachers’ pedagogical practices have become more inclusive over time, but there is mixed evidence of change in other types of positive teaching practices. At the same time, the teaching environment has become much more challenging, as class sizes have increased dramatically over time.

3.7.2 Trends in EQUIP-T programme areas

Relative to boys, girls have improved their Kiswahili and maths skills at a faster rate over the last four years, consistent with the overall goal of the EQUIP-T programme. Girls now significantly outperform boys in Kiswahili, and have narrowed the gender gap in maths. The comparatively stronger learning gains by girls than boys over the period is likely to be at least partly related to more inclusive teaching strategies, and greater involvement of girls in classroom interactions strategies that are in line with EQUIP-T’s teacher in-service training, which covered genderresponsive pedagogy.

Disparities in learning achievement that favour pupils who speak Kiswahili at home, compared to those who do not, are large and strongly significant across all three survey rounds. Although the gaps in average scores are persistently large, there has been progress in narrowing the gap in Kiswahili – but less so in maths – since baseline. The share of pupils who have a teacher that can speak the same first language as them has increased, but there is little evidence that this has translated into more supportive classroom practices.

Pupils from richer backgrounds have continued to outperform pupils from poorer backgrounds since baseline, and while the gap has narrowed modestly for Kiswahili, it has grown for maths. Explanations for why children from poorer backgrounds struggle more with learning include absence from school, and being hungry during school, consistent with patterns found in many other countries. Some of the structures created under community-linked components of EQUIP-T, particularly PTPs and JUU clubs, have focused part of their time and resources on tackling these barriers.