2.3 Sampling

School management

We measured school management quality using a version of the Bloom et al. (2015) tool adapted for Uganda by Crawfurd (2017) and for Lagos by the research team. We carried out interviews with head teachers and administered 15 questions covering five main areas: target-setting, monitoring, operations (planning and leading teaching), people (teacher) management, and leadership. These are detailed below.

● Operations (planning and leading teaching): this covers the leadership of teaching in a school, the use of differentiated teaching for a range of students, how schools use data and assessment to guide practice, and how education best-practices are adapted;

● Monitoring: this includes how the school tracks and monitors performance; whether there are systems and processes in place to identify and fix problems; and how stakeholders are involved in ongoing quality improvement (students, teachers, community);

● Target setting: this includes how school targets are linked to student outcomes; specific targets for departments and teachers, how appropriate the targets are;

● People: how teachers are recruited, managed, supported and retained;

● Leadership: how the school’s vision is set.

The research team adapted the tool, most notably through expanding the tool “horizontally” (by introducing half scores) to allow for greater variation of scores and finer differentiation between levels of management, following Lemos & Scur (2017) and also clarifying the scoring rubric to be more in line with the original conceptual distinctions from the World Management Survey (e.g. clarifying that a higher score should be awarded the more evidence there is of a structured system being in place). Each interview was double scored: the first interviewer was accompanied by a second interviewer whose main role was to monitoring the quality of the interview being conducted by taking notes and separately scoring the responses after the interviews had ended. Additional detail on the adaptation and implementation of the tool is available in Annex B.

All 37 Bridge schools in Lagos were matched with low- and medium-fee private schools derived from EDOREN’s recent P4 study, which compared private and public school P4 pupils in Lagos. This study contains the most comprehensive dataset for our variables of interest. Matching was conducted using a composite score index based on three variables: nominal school fees, total number of pupils, and GPS coordinates (longitude and latitude). A randomly selected sub-set of public schools closest to the sample of Bridge schools was then drawn from the P4 sample to create the public school arm for this study. The matching procedures followed are detailed in Annex D.

In each school, a P2 teacher was randomly selected from a list provided by the head teacher. This teacher’s classroom was observed, and the teacher was administered the teacher motivation questionnaire. Fifteen children from the teacher’s classroom were randomly assigned to sit a numeracy test or a literacy test using sheets placed in a bag. In many of the private schools sampled, teams were not able to sample and administer questionnaires to 15 pupils because schools had class sizes with fewer than 15 pupils. In order to obtain the required number of students, the team therefore visited a larger than planned number of private schools.

A total of 124 schools were visited across several LGAs in Lagos State and the following instruments were administered: Pupil test, classroom observation, teacher interview, head teacher interview, and parents’ interview, as summarised in the table below.