YANDISA 2019-20 Impact Evaluation Report
In July 2019 we embarked on a new special project – the YANDiSA Programme – in partnership with Dr. Miriam Altman (National Planning Commissioner) and New Leaders Foundation. The Youth Accelerating National Development in School Advancement (YANDiSA) programme is an initiative aimed at empowering high school students to become positively and actively engaged in improving school outcomes. The programme works with the Representative Council of Learners, which are mechanisms that are already intended to foster youth leadership, learner participation in school management, and promote youth civic engagement and democracy.
2020 disrupted some of our planning, but we are happy to have been able to evaluate the impact of the programme drawing the following key lessons:
- YANDiSA programme training and support activities lead to positive changes in learners’ knowledge and non-cognitive abilities
- Although it is too early to assess the impact of School Action Projects (SAPs) on the broader school community, learner and educator reports suggest that 2019/2020 SAP implementation contributed to some positive shifts in education outcomes
- Effective SAPs implementation is dependent on the successful implementation of school-based workshops
- To create an enabling environment and ensure the effective engagement of the RCL by the YANDISA programme, there is a need to improve buy-in and support from school leadership
- Training activities in combination with school-based workshop are significant contributors to programme success
We are currently fundraising to run YANDISA again in 2021 and hope to find new partners in grow this impactful special project. Read the YANDISA Impact Evaluation Report.
Report Foreward by Dr. Miriam Altman
Youth Accelerating National Development in School Advancement, or YANDiSA, is an initiative aimed at empowering high school student leaders to become positively and actively engaged in improving school outcomes. It is the students that are most affected by education issues, but so often are not active participants in school and education improvement efforts.
The idea of YANDiSA was initiated in 2016. After some engagement and searching, the Speaker of Ekurhuleni Metro, the Honourable Patricia Kumalo, linked me to their newly established Junior City Council. We met in school classrooms (thanks mostly to the Principal of Brakpan High School) where we debated ideas and learned about different programmes, to ultimately shape YANDiSA. In 2019, with initial funds raised, enke: Make Your Mark was identified as the best partner to host and implement the YANDISA Programme. enke has a powerful facilitation model, an ethos that sees young people as “leaders for today”, and was willing to experiment for continuous improvement. And this is what we did over the course of 2019 – we had to adapt continuously and this turned out to be a great strength of the programme. The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation’s (MSDF’s) Data Driven Districts programme, and its implementing agent, New Leaders Foundation (NLF), also joined us on the journey.
For myself and enke, the idea was to develop young people that can drive evidence-based institutional improvement, starting with their own school. For NLF, the programme was an opportunity to shift DDD focus on district and school leadership as the main drivers of a data-driven culture within schools, and consider the possibilities introduced by placing data directly in the hands of learners to help drive education outcomes. Since the start YANDISA and its partners have asked how to design a high impact scalable programme. Impact requires an approach that inspires and mobilises young leaders into positive action, hopefully in a way that is institutionally located so as to have systemic impacts. Scalability requires that institutional focus, but also that the programme be simple, light touch, and not resource intensive.
This evaluation report document the lessons from YANDISA pilot implementation, which produced results that were beyond even our imagination for this first test. The report offers insights into those results and guidance on how to strengthen the programme going forward. For me personally, there was some interesting learning. I had wondered whether grade 8’s were too young, but we found that they sometimes made the most insightful contributions once they found their voice. Should we mix schools from different income groups, and should we include quintile 5 schools? The pilot had a mix schools located in lower and higher income communities. Their performance seemed to have little to do with income and more to do with school leadership. One of the schools from a lower income community was a star performer and, in contrast, one of the schools with the most challenges was from a higher income community. I was not sure if the students would be interested in the comparative school performance data. We found that they were excited by it and couldn’t get enough of those charts and information. I wondered if the fantastic energy in the session would dissipate once back learners were back in their school reality. I was truly stunned that most of their projects were already moving within a fortnight after the first residential workshop.
The YANDISA programme is testament to what we could achieve in education if only we have the right youth engagement and give space for young leaders to drive improvement. One would never drive organisational change without enlivening the engagement of the main actors, and yet we think it can be done in schools without engaging learners. For education improvement to happen, the learners have to understand it and feel a sense of control over it.
We are grateful to our donors, the terrific work led by enke, the support of the New Leaders Foundation, the Gauteng Department of Basic Education, and the participating schools, learners, staff, and parents.
Read the YANDISA Impact Evaluation Report.
