The government risks overwhelming an already strained education system if it fails to fully fund its plans to make grade R compulsory and expand early childhood education, warns the latest report from the 2030 Reading Panel.
The panel was established in 2022 to advise the government on how to improve children’s weak reading skills — a major obstacle to their success at school.
“Anything we don’t properly plan and budget for will only make results deteriorate further,” said the report’s author Siphumelele Lucwaba.
SA learners’ poor reading skills had consistently been laid bare in a series of international and local studies, said Lucwaba. The 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls) found 81% of grade 4 learners could not read for meaning in any language, while the 2022 SA Systemic Evaluation found only 20% of grade 3 learners performed at grade level or above for reading in their home language. Basic Education Laws Amendment (Bela) Act
The Basic Education Amendment Act, signed into law by President Cyril Ramaphosa in September, extends compulsory schooling to grade R. While spending on grade R has gradually increased in the past decade and is projected to reach R7bn by 2026/27, providing universal access will cost an additional R18bn a year, said the report. Fully funding early childhood education will require R55 per child per day, more than triple the current subsidy of R17 per child per day, it said.
The National Treasury had planned to allocate an extra R19.1bn in the February budget to basic education to secure teacher posts and expand early learning. Of this, R10bn was to be set aside for early childhood education, which would have taken the daily subsidy to R24 per child and extended programmes to an extra 700,000 children.
Those spending plans are now in doubt as the cabinet rejected finance minister Enoch Godongwana’s plan to raise additional revenue by increasing VAT by two percentage points and it has yet to agree on a new budget.
Reading Panel member Mary Metcalfe, who was previously MEC for education in Gauteng, said SA could learn from the experience of Peru, which had similar levels of poverty and inequality to SA, yet had improved learning outcomes significantly over a short period of time.
“They were driven by a passion for improving learning. There is a lot of lip service [paid to SA’s reading crisis] but we don’t [always] see that intention translating into clear plans with budgets,” said Metcalfe.
Former Peru minister of education Jaime Saavedra, who addressed the Reading Panel’s annual conference on Tuesday, said Peru confronted its education crisis head on after its dismal performance in the 2012 Programme for International International Student Assessment (Pisa).
“The Pisa results came out three weeks after I started [as education minister] in 2013.... Peru was last ... of the 65 countries of Pisa. Not the bottom 10%. Last. And that was a shock,” he said.“
“We could have decided to play the results down ... but we didn’t. Instead, we decided to own the problem, to use the results to say, ‘Look, we’re not in trouble. We’re in deep trouble,’” he said.
The reforms he instituted included revitalised teaching careers and making sure appointments were based on merit, emphasising and supporting learning with curriculum changes and increased school hours for secondary schoolchildren, improving management and tackling infrastructure problems.
In the next round of Pisa assessments in 2015 Peru showed the biggest improvement in Latin America and the fourth largest in the world.
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