The nonprofit DG Murray Trust (DMGT) has called on the basic education department to step up its efforts to help children catch up on the learning losses caused by the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, warning that children with poor reading skills are more likely to drop out of school.
SA’s school dropout rate is a major concern for the government. Despite spending more than 6% of GDP on education, only about 60% of the children who enrol in grade 1 complete matric.
While some of the children who drop out pursue other education or training opportunities, the majority do not, which severely limits their employment prospects.
“There is only one province — the Western Cape — that has publicly stated it is implementing a catch-up programme to help with reading and learning losses due to the pandemic. The lack of response [from the others] is a big concern for us, because the worrying decline in reading capability has long-term implications for the education system and the performance of learners,” said the trust’s Zero Dropout Campaign communications lead, Colin Wardle.
Poor reading skills increase the likelihood of grade repetition, which increases the risk of pupils disengaging and dropping out, he said.
SA’s literacy crisis deepened during Covid-19 due to intermittent school closures and periods of rotational learning, during which children attended school on alternate days.
The pandemic reversed a decade of slow but steading improvement in child literacy, with the 2021 Progress in International Literacy Study (Pirls) showing 81% of grade 4 pupils could not read for meaning, a decline on the 78% achieved in 2016. The Reading Panel convened by former deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka released a report in 2023 that showed 30% of children still don’t know most of the letters of the alphabet by the end of grade 2.
Acquiring good reading skills in the early grades is vital, as once children progress beyond the foundation phase they need to be able to extract meaning from the texts they read to master the content of the curriculum.
“If children are not able to develop foundational reading skills they are unable to grasp core learning concepts, to the detriment of their trajectory through school and thereby increasing the risk of dropping out,” said Zero Drop Out Campaign programme director Merle Mansfield.
In a report released ahead of the government’s planned announcement of the 2023 matric results on Thursday, the DMGT’s Zero Dropout Campaign set out the case for improving literacy in the foundation phase to keep children in school.
Other countries with a similar level of economic development to SA have successfully implemented programmes to reintegrate pupils who had been out of school for extended periods, it said, citing India’s Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) project.
This is an accelerated approach to teaching that groups children according to their learning level rather than their age or grade. TaRL has been successfully adapted and implemented in Zambia and Nigeria, and shows promising results in several sites in SA, said Wardle.
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