Addressing transitions into public schools for children undertaking Complementary Basic Education in Ghana

Children who completed the Complementary Basic Education (CBE) programme in the academic year 2016/17 (known as CBE Cycle 4) made the transition into public schools for the academic year 2017/18 ( commencing September 12, 2017). During October and November 2017, the research team visited the public schools where the CBE children made the transition and collected learner assessments on local language literacy (i.e. the Ghanaian language taught at the student’s school), English and numeracy for all CBE Cycle 4 children who were present in school during the data collection visit and also on a comparable group who was selected based on a similar set of characteristics including gender, age and grade attended by the CBE Cycle 4 children.  

This report presents the main findings on the information collected from CBE Cycle 4 children and the comparison group, referred in this report as non-CBE children. Firstly, we focus on establishing the likeness of the sample based on variables including gender composition, age, grade, region, language and implementing partner representation. This will be done to demonstrate the robustness of the research design for the current study. We then examine whether there are differences based on household characteristics, work status, family status, experience in school and attitudes to school. This is followed by a comparison of students’ proficiency levels and learning outcomes which are examined by gender, language and region. The main aim of the report is to provide evidence on whether CBE and non-CBE children are comparable, in a statistical sense, and if this provides a strong baseline analysis to then measure changes over time between these groups