Early childhood education plan looks good – but will it work?

MOVES are afoot to make it mandatory for all children in South Africa to undergo two years of early childhood development (ECD) before they begin formal schooling in Grade 1 at the age of 6.

In principle, it is a move that should be welcomed to ensure that our children are future-fit by the time they leave the school system; able not only to survive in the world, but to flourish.

Since April, putting the plan into practice has been the responsibility of the Department of Basic Education.

The department has since found a “number of challenges”, from underfunding to a lack of infrastructure.

One of the ways it can address this is to increase the capacity at primary schools in the form of more classrooms and foundation phase teachers.

It sounds good on paper. Our basic education system tells a very different story: on average, of 100 pupils who start Grade 1, only 60 will write their matric exams 12 years later, 37 will pass and 12 will go to university. Not all of them will graduate.

We need to change the numbers, but we can do that only by fixing the system. The policies exist, the funding certainly does too, but there are far too many faults in the system: a lack of accountability for teachers, exacerbated by ineffective and timid, sometimes incompetent, departmental oversight.

Parents who can, vote with their feet. We are left with the bitter irony of empty classrooms in township schools and overfull classrooms in suburban schools many kilometres away from where the pupils actually live.

Some parents will go even further by going private altogether.

The brutal question is whether this new policy will make any difference whatsoever – or just add to the burden on that part of the system that is already creaking under an intolerable burden.