SA’s education system is in a dismal state. By every assessment, most pupils attending state schools struggle to master crucial literacy and numeracy skills in the foundational years. Such deficits make it difficult for children to succeed in the grades that follow and ultimately limit their prospects for pursuing tertiary studies or finding a decent job.
Basic education minister Siviwe Gwarube’s focus on early learning is thus welcome. She is right, too, to emphasise that education is a not just a social programme but an economic necessity, vital for closing SA’s inequality gap. There is ample research showing that putting money into the foundational phase offers the best return on investment, and that quality education is the bedrock of economic growth.
The latest evidence in this regard comes from a World Bank report this week, which warns that SA will remain stuck in a low-growth trajectory unless it resolves its infrastructure constraints, improves the efficiency of public spending and strengthens its human capital by improving education in the early grades.
This last point is often lost in SA’s debates about education. It is, of course, important to celebrate the achievements of grade 12 students as they exit the school system, but in the ever-increasing hype that surrounds the annual announcement of the matric results it is easy to overlook that far too many children fall by the wayside: the national throughput rate is just 63%. One important contributor to SA’s high grade repetition and dropout rates is the poor quality of the education pupils receive in the foundation phase, which runs up to grade 3.
About four-fifths of SA’s 10-year-olds have such rudimentary literacy skills they struggle to extract meaning from the texts they read, according to the 2021 Progress in International Literacy Study. Grade 4 children who took the tests in 2021 scored worse than participants did in 2016, highlighting the tremendous learning losses caused by the government’s response to Covid-19, and the challenge that lies ahead to get all of SA’s children reading with ease and fluency.
SA learners fared just as badly in recent international tests to gauge their proficiency in maths and science, with scores regressing in both the 2023 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and last year’s Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality survey. Even before scores slid, SA’s improvements over previous decade were uninspiring, creeping up at a glacial pace.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Consider Brazil, where in the space of four years the municipality of Sobral almost doubled the literacy rate for second-graders, from 49% in 2000 to to 92% in 2004. It did that by prioritising reading, investing in teachers, and conducting regular assessments with rigorous evaluation of the quality of the education provided. By 2015 Sobral had shot to first place in Brazil’s basic education development index.
Gwarube is quite open about the crisis in foundational learning. She has ample local research and evidence to guide her and is clearly planning all the right things: wider access to early childhood development, improving the quality of teaching in the early grades, and scaling up mother-tongue education. What’s needed now is a concerted push to get the job done.
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