1 December 1-2:00pm GMT
Accountability and trust of teachers in South Africa: the role of relations and professional standards
This event is part of the School of Education’s Bristol Conversations in Education research seminar series. These seminars are free and open to the public.
Hosted by the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Curriculum (TLC)
Speaker: Professor Melanie Ehren, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands
South Africa’s education system is one of the most unequal in the world. Only the top 16% of South African grade 3 children are performing at the appropriate grade level, while the learning gap between the poorest 60% of students and the wealthiest 20% of students grows from 3 to 4 grade levels by the time they reach grade 9 (World Bank, 2008; Spaull and Kotze, 2015). Professional accountability (in addition to vertical oversight from, and reporting to the district) is an important part of how teaching standards are supposed to be improved to address these inequalities such as through performance measurement and whole-school evaluation. In this presentation Professor Ehren will present the outcomes of an ESRC-funded study in primary education which highlights how trust can impede on professional accountability and can act as a barrier for change.