In President Cyril Ramaphosa’s opening address of the national dialogue, after inviting us to “confront our realities openly, respectfully and constructively”, he claimed that “no perspective is too inconvenient to be heard”.
He noted that “history teaches us that nations are not defined solely by their difficulties; they are defined by how they respond to challenges they face”, before asking some pointed questions, including “Why, after decades of democracy, are the prospects for a white child so much better than those of a black child?”
Any answer would be multifaceted, but our schooling system is certainly a contributing factor. Since less than 5% of the children in SA are white and since school results and education levels are predictive of prospects (by being predictive of human capital formation and in turn future employment and earnings prospects), a review of the performance of our education system is a good place to start.
The National Development Plan (NDP), released in 2014, set targets for our nation. One of the goals was to increase the number of pupils eligible for bachelor’s programmes with mathematics and science to 450,000 per annum by 2030. It certainly is an inconvenient perspective that in recent years about 20,000, or 5% of the target, met the University of Cape Town science faculty’s entrance requirements of 70% for matric mathematics, and that we won’t meet the annual target over the period 2015-35.
National and international studies provide plenty of evidence of the gap between the theoretical objective and practical reality: in recent years about half of the target of 450,000 wrote mathematics as part of their National Senior Certificate (with the overwhelming majority performing too poorly to study Stem subjects); according to the international Timss assessment, less than 10% of our 11-year-old pupils are on track to read for a Stem degree; and the overwhelming majority of grade 6 pupils writing the systemic tests conducted by the Western Cape education department are not on track either.
Working backwards from the NDP’s 2030 objective, those responsible for reaching the NDP target — the president, the ministers of basic education, higher education and science & technology, would have known at the date of the NDP’s publication that the 450,000 pupils who will be embarking on a maths or science bachelor’s in 2030 would already have been born, and would be entering school in 2018. They would know that improving our junior school maths teachers' subject competence levels and overcoming their pedagogical shortcomings was urgently needed. Yet this has still not been rectified a decade later.
This cohort of pupils is already in high school, with only a small fraction of the 450,000 target being on track — same as last year — largely because our high school maths teaching capacity constraints have not been alleviated: there is no reason to believe that more than 5% of the target will be achieved in each of the next 15 years without meaningful change.
The disconnect between the NDP and the current crop of pupils reminds us that actions speak louder than words. Those who will be starting university in 2040 have already been born, and they should be receiving early childhood development opportunities now, and teachers should be trained now. It is damning that schools are dropping mathematics as a matric subject due to shortages of teachers, when to meet the NDP target we need a multiple of the number now writing maths in matric.
Analysis by the Copenhagen Consensus shows that the most cost effective interventions include structured pedagogy — defined as a coherent package of inputs, typically textbooks, lesson plans and teacher training and coaching that work together to improve in class teaching — and teaching pupils according to their learning level rather than their age or grade (which can be accomplished by technology that adapts to each child’s learning level).
Ramaphosa declared that the national dialogue was “not a partisan platform” and “a national platform”, though saying so doesn’t make it so. A dialogue is by definition bidirectional. One wonders what steps the government has taken to implement international best practice. It should consider replacing the policy of automatic progression (including keeping children in literacy class until they can read), increased streaming of pupils (so that teachers have a homogeneous class to teach), introduce specialist maths teachers in junior school, and start the maths literacy track from an earlier age (say grade 8).
Steps need to be taken to ensure that all pupils are connected to the internet (rural schools in more than 100 countries have used Starlink to do this, including in much of Africa), and we need to ensure that pupils have access to affordable devices and AI-powered chatbots. Asked pointedly: if I built an entirely free AI maths tutor trained on the SA mathematics and mathematics literacy syllabus, would the department of basic education pilot its use in 2026 and promote it once it demonstrated effectiveness?
The NDP allows us to measure the extent to which our government has underperformed against its own targets in recent years. This is a sober reminder of the need to ensure that the national dialogue does not precede another lost decade: if it is to change lives and be worthy of the name, there needs to be evidence of listening and planning, and evidence that the listening led to action and positive change. Otherwise the uncomfortable truth will remain that many SA pupils have limited prospects.
• Becker, a retired actuary and recently qualified maths teacher, is founder of MyTutor.chat.
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