Cuts ‘will hurt plans to boost literacy’

Budget cuts threaten to derail efforts to tackle SA’s literacy crisis, warns the latest assessment from an advisory panel chaired by former deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka.

The 2030 Reading Panel was established in 2022 to counsel the government on how to improve the poor reading skills of SA children, which present a major obstacle to their success at school.

SA’s poorest children were hardest hit by the disruption to schooling during the Covid-19 pandemic and they would be disproportionately affected by any further budget cuts, the panel said in its 2024 Background Report released on Tuesday. Its warning comes as the Treasury finalises the 2024 budget, due to be tabled in parliament by finance minister Enoch Godongwana next week.

“If we thought we were in trouble before, as we head into times of increased fiscal austerity we are about to see the worst of it,” said Reading Panel secretariat Sipumelele Lucwaba. The poorest 70% of learners were already five to 10 times less likely to be able to read, and would bear the brunt of any further budget cuts, she said.

Drawing on budget analysis from the Wits Public Economy Project, the panel noted that real government spending per learner was less than R24,000 in 2020 and was set to fall to R21,635 by 2025, with further reductions in real expenditure on basic education expected over the medium term.

The Treasury is grappling with a R37bn wage bill shortfall, after the government agreed to a higher than anticipated settlement with unions.

Closing the gap was likely to include reducing teacher headcount and reducing spending on items such as workbooks and learning and teaching support materials, measures that would undermine efforts to improve literacy levels, said the report. Last year’s budget included an 8.9% cut to the budget for workbooks and learning and teaching support materials for 2023/24.

“This makes absolutely no sense — given the literacy crisis we should not be cutting funding for workbooks,” said Lucwaba. “It is evident there is no strategic planning. If we thought things were bad, they are about to get worse,” she said.

SA had been making slow but steady literacy gains before Covid-19 struck, but the intermittent school closures imposed set reading skills back to where they had been in 2011, said the panel, referring to the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study. A staggering 81% of grade 4 children could not read for meaning in any language in 2021 and 27% could not read at all, it said.

The lack of a national strategy to drastically increase the number of learners who could read for meaning and ensure 2021’s grade 4 learners caught up was alarming, said the report, warning that if SA continued at its current pace, 64% of grade 4 learners would still not be able to read for meaning by 2031.

Only Gauteng, Western Cape, Eastern Cape and the Northern Cape had implemented reading programmes.

Gauteng partnered with WordWorks to implement a R107m reading programme in schools offering grade R between 2022 and 2024, which is 80% donor-funded, while the Western Cape has collaborated with Funda Wande to implement a reading for meaning programme in all Afrikaans and isiXhosa schools, with a threeyear budget of R111m funded by the provincial education department.

The Eastern Cape is rolling out graded readers to all learners in the foundation phase and the Northern Cape has partnered with donors to provide a new iteration of early-grade reading support materials.