As SEED’s organizational focus and its leadership programmes evolved over time, so have its various impact indicators. These have ranged from monitoring indicators such as school resilience (assessed via educators seeking jobs outside of education), to school staff rating the various aspects of school’s organizational climate (using five areas of organizational health: morale, goals, roles, processes and relationships), through to evaluating learner performance outcomes (for example, through comparing ‘before and after’ matric results for the targeted high schools).

While these impact results were positive (with more detailed information available), the focus has since changed to more systemic impact evaluations. These include a combination of internal impact measures (for example, ‘before and after’ required support ratings by the school principals for their respective Circuit Managers), or tracking the objective indicator of the Data Driven District platform education officials’ logins over time.

Due to the systemic nature of our interventions, there is also a growing emphasis on the external or independent research reports. In an effort to measure education sector performance, the Department of Basic Education (DBE) regularly commissions the School Monitoring Survey. The survey measures 12 key indicators including indicator number 12 which measures “the percentage of school principals rating the support services of districts as being satisfactory”. The 2024 report concludes: “A number of provinces showed notable increases from 2017 to 2022, with the largest increases from principals of schools in the Eastern Cape and Limpopo”. This reporting period coincides directly with SEED’s initiative to develop the capacity of 133 Circuit managers (63% of all Circuit Managers) in the Eastern Cape province and indicates that the support by senior leadership for the initiative as well as the programmes themselves contributed to a significant improvement in the support that principals received from Circuit Managers.