Marks leap as pupils transfer to top schools

PUPILS who transfer from a weak school to a top-performing institution improve their maths marks by 28% – and if they are black‚ their language scores go up 12%.

Stellenbosch University researchers say they have proved the link between good schools and high marks for the first time by following the same pupils in the Western Cape for six years.

In one group‚ they monitored test results in grades 3‚ 6 and 9‚ and in the other they followed pupils who were in Grade 6 in 2007 through to matric in 2013.

Marisa von Fintel and Servaas van der Berg‚ of the university’s economics department, said: “The impact of attending a top-performing school for learners between grades 3‚ 6 and 9 is [about] a year’s worth of learning‚ based on [maths] test scores.”

The researchers used the Western Cape’s centralised education management information system to track the pupils’ results even when they changed schools.

They treated 347 of the province’s 1 480 schools as top performers based on the results of standardised language and maths tests written at the end of grades 3‚ 6 and 9.

“We know . . . that there is substantial mobility of learners between schools in the Western Cape‚” Von Fintel and Van der Berg wrote in the Stellenbosch journal Research on Socio-Economic Policy.

“Using this, and identifying [those] who switched schools‚ in some cases the same learners can be observed as they attend a low-performing school and again as they attend a high-performing school.

“The results seem to indicate that attendance of a top-performing school improves the [maths] test scores of a learner by [about] 28%.

“The equivalent improvement in language test scores is [about] 6%.”

Black pupils’ language scores improved by 12%‚ and the researchers said this was probably because they received more exposure to English and Afrikaans – the languages in which they were tested – at top schools.