By Dr Eric Schollar
My early association with what was to become the Zenex Foundation started during the pre-1994 period when Corporate Social Responsibility programmes were strongly influenced by the Sullivan Code and the pace of political and social change was rapidly increasing.
After the watershed year of 1994, the Zenex Foundation was established as a separate legal entity, with its own staff and its own developmental identity. The first formal report I researched for the Foundation was in 2000; an evaluation of the Group Readers Programme of the READ Educational Trust. In 2006, and in conjunction with Jennifer Roberts, we produced a meta-evaluation of 32 projects of different types that were funded by Zenex between 1995 and 2005. Along with this study, in 2006 Jennifer Roberts and I also produced a History of the Foundation over the same period, that concluded with a review of the strategy adopted for the 2006 to 2015 period. This strategy defined the Foundation’s partnership with government as one of adding value to the investments of the state through the research and development of appropriate strategic and theoretical approaches, as well as best-practices and materials, in the improvement of the quality of the outcomes and impacts of the education system.
As a consequence, since inception the trustees of the Foundation have placed an increasing level of stress on the development of specific and quantifiable performance indicators for projects to allow reliable and accurate assessments of their success or failure. These indicators, they have insisted, should include the products, outputs or impacts of the projects evaluated rather than deal exclusively with the processes through which these projects proposed to achieve impact on their intended beneficiaries. This represented an important insight into the nature of both development projects and formal evaluation studies insofar as it recognized that evidence of achievement of the means through which impact is supposed to occur is not sufficient evidence that such impact has, in fact, occurred.
This was not always a popular position preceding and immediately after 1994, being seen as overly positivist and ‘instrumental’ and was in stark contrast to the almost exclusively qualitative, participative and ‘ethno-methodological’ methods, focussing research largely on behavioural change in teachers and learners, that prevailed at that time. Since then, the recognition that the measurement of change in learner performance should form the key summative indicator of project effectiveness has become increasingly widespread in both academic institutions and research agencies; as it has in research by the State in the form of the National Systemic Evaluation, the National Annual Assessments and in cross-national studies like TIMSS, SACMEQ and the MLA.
Together with The Shuttleworth Foundation, The XStrata Trust and the Anglo American Chairman’s Fund, the Foundation funded a significant proportion of the cost of the research and development phase, the research and evaluation phase and the replication phase of research for what became my PhD. This reported the use of an evidence-based approach to understanding and improving the outcomes of mathematical education in South African primary schools between 2004 and 2012.
In more recent years, the Foundation has increased its emphasis on researching and improving the significant backlogs in learner content comprehension in each grade that are prevalent on a national scale as our assessment policy has become increasingly out-of-step with the requirements of the content sequences of our curriculum. This disjunction presents the single most significant obstacle to the feasibility of achieving impact on mathematics performance by the national education system, and by smaller-scale developmental programmes, alike. As long as teachers at any level are faced with classes in which only a small proportion of learners have achieved the minimum expected grasp of content that allows them to benefit from instruction in their current grades – while the majority are one, two or even three years below this benchmark – it is unrealistic to expect them to achieve high levels of performance for the majority of their learners.
In summary, the Zenex Foundation has, since 1994, been in the forefront of requiring and funding the systematic evaluation of developmental programmes they support. They have been instrumental in the growth of studies that reflect on both quantitative impact and the qualitative relationship between context and agency that explain the causation of this impact. They have, importantly, provided a significant basis for the development and survival of independent evaluation agencies, including my own, that have added real value to the underlying capacity of the educational environment.
I wish Gail Campbell and all the staff of the Zenex Foundation every success during the next 30 years!!
