The DA launched a scathing attack on basic education minister Angie Motshekga in parliament on Thursday, saying she presided over a schooling system that was failing to provide children with the skills they needed to enter the job market.
“Listening to minister Motshekga this week has left me feeling like Alice in Wonderland," the DA’s shadow minister for basic education, Baxolile Nadoda, said.
“While SA learners cannot read for meaning, while they attend schools in unsafe environments without food, while they sit in overcrowded classrooms with overworked and underqualified teachers forced to teach an outdated curriculum, the department has no plans in place to turn the situation around to save this generation,” Nadoda said.
“How are learners meant to eventually participate in the labour market if they can’t understand what they read?” he asked, referring to the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), released on Tuesday. It showed 81% of SA’s grade 4 children could not read for meaning in any language, the worst result among the 57 countries that participated.
The 2021 results were markedly worse than those of 2016, highlighting the extensive learning losses caused by the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which saw schools shuttered or offering children face-to-face teaching only on alternate days for extended periods.
In a study published in 2022, researchers estimated that most pupils were a year behind where they would have been were it not for Covid-19.
“These devastating outcomes are of your making. Your department closed schools for far too long and didn’t have plans while they were shut,” Nadoda said. The DA-led Western Cape was the only province that had a budgeted programme to help children catch up, he said.
Motshekga emphasised that before Covid-19, there had been progress in children’s reading ability. “Between 2011 and 2016, SA saw the second-fastest improvement among all PIRLS participating countries, after Morocco,” she said in her budget speech.
The 2021 PIRLS study showed that the reading skills of children improved as they progressed through school, in line with a study conducted by the department of education in 2021 among children in grades 3, 6 and 9, she said. “This is an indication that our system self-corrects, the longer learners remain and progress through the phases of our system.”
Responding to Nadoda, she said grade 4 children who could not read for meaning were not illiterate as they had acquired some reading skills. “Our kids can read. They can combine M-A-N to make man. But many of them cannot operate at a more (sophisticated) level ... and that is why they are not passing (PIRLS),” she said.
Reading for meaning refers to the ability to comprehend and extract information from a section of text, a more advanced skill than decoding letters and their combinations to pronounce words correctly.
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