The Teacher Development Programme (TDP) is a six-year (2013-2019) programme funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), with a total budget of £34 million. It seeks to improve the quality of teaching in primary schools, junior secondary schools, and colleges of education at the state level in northern Nigeria. It works through in-service training for primary teachers, reform of pre-service teacher education, and strengthening evidence-based research on teaching. This evaluation focuses on the first of these three outputs: in-service training and support for primary teachers in the three core curriculum subjects of English, mathematics, and science. The programme initially operated in three states, Jigawa, Katsina, and Zamfara, and was later extended to Kaduna and Kano. This survey covers a group of schools that were randomly assigned to receive the TDP intervention in Jigawa, Katsina, and Zamfara, and a control group of schools in the same states that did not receive the TDP intervention. The impact evaluation has three main purposes:Formative to help inform the implementation of TDP in Phase 1 of in-service activities and the design and implementation in its Phase 2;Summative to help inform TDP, DFID Nigeria, and other education stakeholders if TDP's in-service teacher training activities have led to improvements in teacher effectiveness and pupil learning levels in English, mathematics, and science and technology; andLearning to assess from TDP what might work for improving teacher effectiveness in Nigeria and elsewhere. The impact evaluation is a theory-based, mixed-methods design. The endline research focuses on the efficiency, effectiveness, impact, and sustainability of the TDP (programme relevance was assessed through the baseline survey). The overarching evaluation questions for the endline research are:Impact: Has TDP caused changes in pupil learning in English, mathematics, and science in TDP schools? (quantitative)Effectiveness: Has TDP led to changes in teacher effectiveness? (qualitative and quantitative) Efficiency: Were TDP results achieved on time and to plan? How does TDP's organisational set-up facilitate delivery? (qualitative and quantitative)Sustainability: Are TDP's impacts on teacher effectiveness sustainable without further DFID support? (qualitative) At the core of this impact evaluation is a constrained randomised design, with half of the sample schools assigned to receive the TDP intervention, while the other half was assigned to the control group. The main source of quantitative data is the sample panel survey of 330 schools in Jigawa, Katsina, and Zamfara conducted in 2014 and 2017. At each sample school, the head teacher and a sample of teachers and pupils were interviewed and tested on their subject knowledge in English, mathematics, and science; lesson observations were conducted; a teacher roster was compiled; and classroom attendance by teachers and pupils was measured. The baseline and endline surveys were timed to allow sufficient time for TDP impact on pupil learning outcomes to be feasible, while ensuring that a panel of pupils could be sampled at baseline and endline within the same school, and producing results in time for them to be of value to the final stages of the TDP. The endline quantitative survey fieldwork was carried out by OPM Nigeria and Education Data, Research and Evaluation in Nigeria (EDOREN). The data from the endline survey available in the World Bank Microdata Catalog are from the TDP IE quantitative endline survey conducted in 2017. For the qualitative research findings and methods see the final endline report under Related Materials.
