One of the biggest challenges the South African education system faces is to improve the performance of learners who are far below par.

The Plus Time project, a study conducted by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) and The Shuttleworth Foundation, was initiated to establish whether a group of Grade 8 learners that were exposed to extra tuition for six months in a year could step up their performance with 10 percentage points.

Researchers also believed that better performance in Mathematics and English would eventually spill over to other areas of learning. Learners from eight schools in the Metropole-South Education Management Development Centre (EMDC) participated in the study.

The results showed a larger increase over time in the performance of the learners who regularly attended Mathematics tuition lessons compared to those not attending regularly. With English tuition, the improvement in project-school learners’ performance generally exceeded those of control-school learners, but the findings were not consistent across the paired schools, and the effects were not as significant as hoped for, the study revealed.

The main conclusion was that for most learners Grade 8 it is too late for meaningful interventions and that mastering basic content of these subjects should be accomplished at the ‘foundation phase’ of schooling at Grade One to Grade Three level. No learner should be allowed to go through the foundation phase if they are not able to read and write fluently.

A follow-up research project  was conducted with the HSRC and the WCED to determine the results of the same learners tested at the end of grade nine and to determine what long-term effects, if any, the tutorials had on them.

The effects observed in the 2008 study were much more consistent and widespread than those initially observed for the original 2007 study. The study concluded that a learners’ language ability, particularly its improvement, is a strong factor influencing their performance in almost all other learning areas, that is, across the curriculum. The effects of the earlier additional tuition after school seem to have become stronger and more widespread over time. Learners from project schools gained much more, over a very broad front, compared to learners from control schools.

The size and consistency of the outcomes for project-school learners who had attended their tuition sessions very well were even more encouraging. Initial Mathematics tuition had lasting effects on the expected numbers-based learning areas such as Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Economic and Management Sciences.

The initial English tuition also benefited learner performance over time in these learning areas, but also in the more closely related text-based learning areas. Interestingly, Additional Language learners benefited more than First Language learners.

The key implication is that sustained (or delayed) and incremental gains seem possible. Not only did the benefits remain evident after some lapse of time, but they also became quite pronounced and widespread.

Download the detailed findings, conclusions and implications of both the studies -

PDF download Second Study report
Download Initial Study report