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This paper reports on the use of multivariate analyses procedures to examine pupil- and school-level factors that contributed to variations in reading and mathematics achievement among Grade 6 pupils in 15 African school systems (Botswana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, the Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zanzibar, and Zimbabwe). The data for this study were collected in 2007 as part of the major SACMEQ III Project, which sought to examine the quality of education offered in primary schools in these countries. (SACMEQ is an acronym for the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality.) At the pupil level, grade repetition, socio-economic background, pupil age, and pupil sex were found to be the most important factors affecting the variations in pupil achievement in these school systems, while at the school level, school resources and school location were identified as the important common factors. South Africa and Zimbabwe were among the school systems with the largest between-school variation (especially in reading), while the Seychelles and Mauritius had the largest within-school variation. In addition, low social equity in pupil achievement was evident in South Africa, Mauritius, and Zimbabwe, while large gender differences in pupil achievement were evident in the Seychelles and to some extent in Tanzania and Kenya, especially in mathematics. Implications of the findings for policy and practice are outlined.

In the research programmes conducted by the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) teachers were considered as the most important human resource inputs to schooling. This paper highlights the characteristics of Grade 6 teachers in terms of: (a) their personal attributes (such as age, gender, general education, professional training, and teaching experience), and (b) their achievement scores in a standardized reading test that was administered during SACMEQ II (2000) and SACMEQ III (2007) across the 15 SACMEQ school systems. These teacher characteristics provide a succinct overview of the quality of the teaching force across the SACMEQ education systems in 2007. The personal characteristics of Grade 6 teachers that have been discussed in this paper are complemented with reading achievement scores in order to provide an indication of the subject matter knowledge of Grade 6 reading teachers, and to show the trend in achievement levels between 2000 and 2007. The results show that there were variations in the characteristics of Grade 6 teachers across SACMEQ school systems in terms of age, gender, general education, professional training, and teaching experience. The results further show that for SACMEQ as a whole, there was an increase in the average achievement scores of teachers, between 2000 and 2007. However, there were large variations in teacher achievement scores across SACMEQ school systems. The challenge for most SACMEQ school systems is to achieve gender equality in the composition of teaching staff while ensuring a balance between academic education, and appropriate pedagogical training for all teachers.