USAID SOUTH AFRICA SCHOOL-BASED SEXUALITY AND HIV PREVENTION EDUCATION ACTIVITY COACHING & MENTORING TRAINING ASSESSMENT REPORT

The project's activities are specifically designed to strengthen, link, and consolidate South African Government (SAG) efforts to link education sector initiatives and health sector initiatives that share a common purpose: a reduction in the incidence of new HIV and TB infections among young people and improved linkages to HIV care and SRH services for learners. One of the core activities, designed to support educators in the effective delivery of comprehensive sexuality education in the classroom context, is the development of and educator training in a package of SLPs for Grades 4-6, 7-9, and 10-12. The SLPs include comprehensive lessons and activities, as well as assessment tasks, to guide educators to teach against the LO Annual Teaching Plans. Throughout the Activity, EDC conducted training workshops for Life Orientation teachers as well as provided support and mentoring for teachers as they started delivering the SLPs in the classrooms. However, in order to secure sustainability of the teacher training workshops and classroom support in a scaled-up model of delivering the new SLPs, the Activity developed a specific training workshop for district-level subject advisors in order to prepare them to facilitate future training workshops and provide mentoring support. HEARD was tasked with assessing the effectiveness of the teacher training workshops and communicated the findings in monthly 'diagnostic' analyses as well as more comprehensive quarterly reports. The coaching and mentoring workshops that are included in this analysis were conducted in the period 31 May to 7 June 2018 in Pinetown, KwaZulu-Natal. The data for the analysis was collected through self-administered paper-based questionnaires. The pre-training questionnaire is included at the end of this report. All participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire prior to the workshop and then to complete a somewhat shorter version of the questionnaire again after the workshop. A total of 213 participants filled in the pre-training questionnaire and 147 filled in the post-training questionnaire. The educators were asked to respond to questions or statements that were organised according to the following themes: their views of value-based statements relating to CSE, SRHR, and HIV, their attitudes towards and opinions of HIV, SRH, and CSE, their support of key messages in the SLPs, their reactions to arguments about CSE, SRHR, and HIV, their sense of confidence with facilitating workshops and mentor educators, and their self-perceived level of skills to train and mentor educators. In sections 1 to 4 the respondents could indicate whether they 'strongly agree', 'agree', 'disagree', 'strongly disagree', or 'don't know'. In response to statements on theme number five, respondents could indicate whether they feel 'not at all confident', 'somewhat confident', 'confident', or 'very confident'. The data was entered into the SPSS statistical software (version 25) and analysed by means of descriptive statistics, composite indices, and paired sample t-tests. The results of the analysis will provide an insight into the impact of the workshops, but the statistical findings should be interpreted with caution due to the relatively small sample size and reliance on self-reported data.