Funding early childhood development (ECD) projects offers education donors the biggest potential return on their investment, as children who participate in these programmes are more likely to succeed at school and university, a leading SA philanthropic organisation said on Tuesday.
Only about 35% of SA children aged under five years have access to early childhood education, and more than half (55%) of the children this age are failing to meeting key developmental milestones, parliament heard earlier in 2023.
Greater investments in ECD would ensure children were school-ready and able to acquire the literacy and numeracy skills they needed to progress through the education system, said Oppenheimer Memorial Trust CEO Tracey Webster, as the organisation released a report on investment opportunities in education in SA. The trust donates up to R170m a year in philanthropic endeavours, with the lion’s share earmarked for education.
Too many children started grade R with learning deficits that they never managed to overcome, said Webster. “You have to fix ECD if you want to fix SA’s reading outcomes,” she said, referring to the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls), which found 81% of SA’s grade 4 learners could not read for meaning.
The report identified underfunding and the shortage of skilled personnel as two of the biggest challenges facing the ECD sector. The consolidated government budget for ECD is just R9.67bn for the 2023/24 financial year, a tiny fraction of the total R309bn set aside for basic education, according to Treasury documents. An extra 410,000 early-learning practitioners and support workers are needed to achieve universal access to ECD, according to the report. It recommended that philanthropists work with organisations advocating for more public funding for ECD, and that the government bolster ECD staffing levels with public employment programmes.
Webster said the wave of teacher retirements set to hit the basic education sector presented a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to flood the system with new teachers who were better trained. “We need to ensure we are equipping teachers properly: there are too many examples of universities turning out teachers who don’t know what they are doing,” she said. The report identified the poor quality of the distance learning degrees offered by Unisa — which trains more than half of SA’s teachers — as a particular concern.
It recommended prioritising the training of student teachers who focused on early-grade literacy and numeracy skills.
The report identified the shrinking pool of research funds available to universities as a significant threat, and recommended increasing support for early to mid-career researchers.
“As a country, we cannot afford to continue to lose our most talented students and early-career researchers to more enticing opportunities abroad, because of the lack of funding available to build a promising career in SA,” it said.
The trust announced a new funding initiative, called the New Frontiers Research Award, which will support early to mid-career researchers. It will complement the Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship Award, which is granted to established researchers doing cutting-edge, internationally significant, work.
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