## **Robustness checks**

In order to ensure that our particular treatment definition, of schools gaining additional teachers to bring PqTR below 90, is not creating a false appearance of systemic results with regard to repetition, we conduct additional analysis employing two alternative definitions of treated schools:

1. The number of teachers employed in the school is higher than in the previous year, and the school’s overall PqTR was above 80 in the previous year and is now below 80.

2. The number of teachers employed in the school is higher than in the previous year, and the school’s overall PqTR was above 100 in the previous year and is now below 100.

For this analysis, we focus on the 2017 allocation of teachers. Using lagged effects, we compare the repetition rates in schools at the end of the 2016/17 year to those at the end of the 2017/18 school year, reflecting a full year of the increased staffing according to the adjusted thresholds.<sup>12</sup>

**Tables 5.7 and 5.8** (in Section 8, Tables), show the findings. Adopting PqTR reduction below 80 as the threshold, we observe impacts on repetition rates in lower primary and overall of a slightly larger scope than with the original treatment definition of PqTR reduction below 90. However, adopting PqTR reduction below 100 as the threshold, although we still observe a substantial reduction in lower primary repetition rates, it does not obtain statistical significance. The findings suggest that reducing PqTRs below 90 is the ‘minimum’ treatment to achieve impacts on student learning.

# **6. Conclusion**

Our findings suggest that improvements in allocation of newly deployed teachers to schools, enabled by improved rules for allocation, can lead to improvements in student learning. Adopting repetition as a proxy for learning, we find that schools which gained additional teachers and brought PqTRs below 90 achieved significant improvements in lower primary repetition rates in comparison to schools with PqTR above 90 which did not gain additional teachers. The findings mirror others from Israel, the United States and India (Angrist and Lavy, 1999; Kreuger, 1999; Muralidharan & Sundararaman, 2013) which suggest that improvements in PTR are associated with improved learning outcomes, and demonstrate that similar dynamics persist in low-income countries. However, we do not observe impacts on dropout rates.

The descriptive analysis also reveals the extent to which rules-based approaches to teacher allocations may face challenges in implementation on the ground. Despite the clarification of allocation rules and provision of software tools to support allocations, the adherence to guidance for allocation of new teachers appears to have been weak and highly variable. At the national level, the allocation of new teachers to districts was not fully aligned with the guidance, with the share of districts’ need for new teachers met through allocations varying from a low of 32 percent to a high of 224 percent across three years. At the district level, too, the quality of allocations was highly variable, with the most successful deploying 75 percent of teachers in accordance to the rules and the least successful just 22 percent. Had the teachers deployed during this period all been allocated according to the guidance, it is likely that the number of schools achieving reduction in PqTR to below 90 would have been larger,

> 12 The comparison of staffing to identify treatment and control schools remains non-lagged, e.g. comparing EMIS data from 2016 and 2017.

21