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5.2 Discussion and recommendations
from Learning In Lagos
by NewGlobe
Teaching qualifications and bachelors’ degrees are not significantly correlated with literacy and numeracy achievement.
The findings in this report highlight in particular the low levels of literacy and numeracy achievement in public schools at the primary 2 level, and the need to support these schools to increase their performance in both subjects. In addition, more research would help unpack why the stark differences in numeracy achievement in private schools compared to public schools found in this report are not as pronounced at the P4 level (EDOREN, 2017).
There are some positive indications for DFID’s investment in Bridge: a Bridge education is correlated with better literacy achievement compared to other private school alternatives, beyond what we would reasonably expect to be the result of selection on observable and unobservable characteristics. However, we do not find significant differences in numeracy achievement between Bridge schools and other private providers in Lagos: a Bridge education is as good as that received in other low-fee private schools for numeracy.
Our findings suggest that Bridge may provide parents with better value for money in literacy, but not numeracy. This does not necessarily equate with better value for money from a policymakers’ perspective, which requires an impact estimate and more information on providers’ costs and financial models.
School management is strongly correlated with higher literacy and numeracy achievement. This suggests that programmes which seek to improve school quality assurance and inspection systems could include mechanisms to score schools on the 5 dimensions of good management captured in the tool: targetsetting, operations, monitoring, people management, and leadership.
DFID should also seek to further understand the reasons why girls in Lagos have higher literacy rates compared to boys. In our ESSPIN study, we find that Lagos is the state with the highest literacy rates in Nigeria, and we find repeatedly that in Lagos girls have better literacy results than boys. There is likely to be much to investigate and learn from this example of positive deviance.
