BOTTOM OF THE CLASS

The government blames Covid for South Africa’s collapse to the bottom of the global rankings in reading. It’s belatedly trying to orchestrate a catch-up strategy by dusting off a reading plan that is more than a decade old

Angie Motshekga says she has a plan. After the latest international reading rankings showed South Africa has lost a decade of progress to become the world’s worst performer, the basic education minister has announced a strategy to improve literacy. It sounds good on paper — only, we’ve heard it before.

Motshekga sketched out her fourpoint plan last week, on the day the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls) results were published. They show that 81% of South Africa’s grade 4 pupils cannot read for meaning in any language, up from 78% in 2016.

Motshekga acknowledged that the results, collated at the end of 2021, are “disappointing”, but laid the blame firmly on the disruptions caused by Covid, reporting that as much as 60% of teaching time was lost in some grades in 2020, and up to 50% in 2021.

Before the pandemic, South Africa’s education system had shown “remarkable improvements” on a range of international tests and was “on the rise”, said Motshekga, insisting that the Pirls results therefore “do not reflect a deterioration in the overall functioning of the education system”.

But education experts argue that the government’s failure to respond coherently to Covid learning losses has worsened disparities within the school system.

South Africa first entered the Pirls test in 2006, achieving a score that showed 87% of grade 4s could not read for meaning in that year. That improved to 82% in 2011 and to 78% in 2016. So, in taking South Africa’s score back to roughly 2011 levels, the pandemic has wiped out more than a decade of progress in reading.

Even more alarming is that the country came last out of the 43 participating countries in 2021, with a score of 288 points against an international average of 500. This puts South Africa two to five years behind other middleincome countries such as Jordan, Egypt, Iran and Brazil.

How is it we have been able to find R28bn to bail out the national carrier, SAA, since 2020, but not even R1bn for reading?

Nic Spaull

The Pirls results confirm South African research showing that Covid caused huge learning losses. But education experts have been scathing about the failure of the national department of basic education (DBE) to orchestrate an immediate national catch-up plan.

In a recent research note, University of Cape Town professor Ursula Hoadley goes as far as to say that the government’s “inertia” and its tendency to leave catch-up decisions to schools and teachers mean that pupils in schools with less capacity and resources have fallen further behind, “deepening inequalities within the school system”.

“There has been no attempt to recoup time in order to remediate learning losses, apart from very recent attempts in one province,” Hoadley adds. “The insistence on a largely business-as-usual approach ... fails to recognise and address the severe educational impact of the pandemic, especially on [pupils] in the poorest communities.”

This has been confirmed by the Pirls results, which reveal that South Africa’s northern and rural provinces suffered the deepest reading losses between 2016 and 2021.

Four provinces experienced declines in reading performance of more than a full year of learning: the North West (-2.4 years), the Free State (-1.6 years), Mpumalanga (-1.2 years) and Limpopo (-1 year). The Western Cape saw the smallest decline (-0.4 of a year).

Over this period, the reading scores of English and Afrikaans schools stayed roughly the same. However, Africanlanguage schools’ performance declined by an average of 58 points — equivalent to just over a year of lost learning. The most significant drop was in Setswana-speaking schools, which declined by 82 points — equivalent to two full years of lost learning.

“This shows that the effects of

Covid were most pronounced on poor and working-class kids, most likely because very few had access to online education and because they lost the most days of schooling,” says Wits University professor of education policy Brahm Fleisch.

“That said, there is no doubt that we

have an early grade reading crisis in that a significant percentage of kids get to the end of grade 3 and haven’t become fluent readers.”

The problem is that children who don’t “learn to read” in grades 1 to 3 will not “read to learn” from grade 4 onwards. In short, most South African nine- and 10year-olds are not acquiring the most elementary building blocks needed to succeed in higher grades.

“The most frustrating thing for me,” says Stellenbosch University associate professor Nic Spaull, “is that there is no budgeted plan to remediate these [pupils]. All around the world you see large, budgeted programmes to catch up on Covid learning losses, but at the DBE it’s business as usual. The curriculum is the same, teaching time is the same.”

Examples of countries that have already instituted the equivalent of multibillion-rand catch-up programmes include Colombia’s Promise programme (R3.5bn), the Indian state of Gujarat’s Goal initiative (R9.5bn), Brazil’s Recovering Learning Losses programme (R4.8bn), and the R7.3bn Plan de Reactivación Educativa that Chile announced last month.

In South Africa only the Western Cape has so far announced a budgeted plan for catching up learning losses — the threeyear R1.2bn “Back on Track” programme. It will involve Saturday classes, holiday camps, after-school tutoring, subject-specific support for grades 10 and 12, additional time allocated to language and maths, teacher training and professional development, and the use of e-learning platforms.

Motshekga’s remedial plan, which she announced last week but is still working on, has four elements:

The provision of a minimum package of learning and teaching support material designed to support reading, including graded readers in African languages;

More direct, targeted teacher training and support, emphasising the effective use of the provided materials; Enhanced school readiness by improving the quality of early childhood development; and

Closer monitoring and evaluation of what provinces are doing to support reading.

Though the minister presented the department’s budget vote last week, she failed to put a budget or more flesh to this plan.

Education experts say that while there is nothing wrong with the plan, former education minister Naledi Pandor announced much the same intervention in 2008 with the Foundation for Learning Campaign.

At the time, Pandor said the plan was being introduced in response to studies that had shown South African children were not able to read, write and count at expected levels. It provided clear directives to provinces on the minimum expectations to improve pupil performance in these areas.

In fact, she went so far as to gazette the plan, putting the force of the law behind her minimum requirement that every teacher must have textbooks, reading series, graded readers, readaloud stories and workbooks.

Despite this, most children still don’t have the most basic texts needed to learn how to read in their home language at school or at home not even anthologies of graded readers, sets of about 20 sequenced stories that cost a mere R15 a book per child and are considered essential in any well-functioning school.

“Motshekga’s list of reading materials is the same as Pandor’s,” laments Spaull. “But Pandor didn’t do it and Motshekga (who has been education minister since 2009) hasn’t done it. We have a minister who says things but doesn’t follow through. How is it that in 2023 we are still talking about the same things?”

Fleisch considers Motshekga’s plan “a good start”, but says the department’s own research shows it’s not enough to provide good learning materials. You also need quality teacher training as well as classroom visits by expert reading coaches to ensure teachers improve the way they teach reading.

The problem is that provincial education departments are already struggling to cover their basic costs and don’t have the personnel to support teachers properly. In six of nine provinces the average foundation-phase subject adviser is responsible for more than 300 teachers. In KwaZulu-Natal the ratio is 1:1,500.

But if it’s just a matter of money, educationalists point out that there is clearly flexibility in South Africa’s overall budget in so far as R12bn was found last year for the president’s teaching assistants programme, not to mention the additional billions found each year to bail out stateowned enterprises.

“How is it we have been able to find R28bn to bail out the national carrier, SAA, since 2020, but not even R1bn for reading?” asks Spaull.

Fleisch concedes that South Africa is in a period of fiscal consolidation, “but if this is a national priority with long-term consequences for the country’s future, we need to find the funds to ensure provinces can put significant effort and focus behind this”.

Both Spaull and Fleisch would add a fifth prong to Motshekga’s plan: universal, annual systemic testing of grade 3 reading, with individual school results made public to aid targeted government support and improve accountability.

They argue that the government’s existing systemic evaluations of a sample of schools are insufficient to catalyse schools and districts into putting the same focus and energy into improving early-grade reading as they do into raising their matric results.

The bottom line is that Motshekga’s plan includes some of the right elements to improve reading, but if it isn’t backed by a significant budget and championed at the highest level, very little will change, and disadvantaged children will remain trapped in poverty.