TOM EATON | Reading between the lines is easier said than done in South Africa

If you want to know the state of the nation, don’t bother listening to the thousands of hollow words read by Cyril Ramaphosa today, or the thousands written by journalists and analysts tomorrow. Instead, simply look at these 15 words in the latest report on the state of childhood literacy in South Africa: “There is ... no national budget that has been allocated to reading interventions or reading resources.”

The report, written by education guru Nic Spaull, revealed the devastation wrought on primary education by the Covid pandemic, with the average 10-year-old now reading at a worse level than the average 9-year-old in 2019.

Given how poorly that average 9-year-old was reading back in 2019, things have clearly gone from very bad to quite a lot worse.

Indeed, the statistic that made headlines on Wednesday — that 82% of South Africa’s grade 4 children can’t read for meaning — is appalling, providing a grim snapshot of hundreds of thousands of young people who will spend the next few years treading water until, exhausted and disheartened, they give up and fall out of the schooling system altogether.

So how has the state reacted to a crisis that is dooming entire cohorts of South African children to a future in which they can become almost nothing but exploited unskilled labour?

Well, you won’t be surprised to know that the state has not implemented any of the recommendations made in last year’s report, and that the only progress made has been at provincial level, where the Western Cape and Gauteng have tried to do what they can.

I must confess, however, that the total lack of funding was a surprise. After all, I would have thought that a government that can plan to spend R900m on advertising in the English Premier League might have had the odd hundred-million lying around to throw at the problem, even just to make it look like it’s doing something.

After all, I would have thought that a government that can plan to spend R900m on advertising in the English Premier League might have had the odd hundred-million lying around to throw at the problem.

And yet, according to the report, the only money committed at national level to the primary school literacy disaster is a sum of R11m (half a Nathi Mthethwa flag, or 1% of what Lindiwe Sisulu’s pals wanted to spend on Tottenham Hotspur’s sleeve), which goes towards a reading programme called the Early Grade Reading Assessment, aimed at children from grade R to grade 3.

While it is good that such initiatives exist, you don’t have to be an accountant to realise how futile this seems: if there are about 3-million children in those four grades at any given moment, that works out to the princely sum of R3.60 per child.

To be clear, readers are not created by government programmes or budget line items. Instead, they are only created when three fairly specific conditions are in place.

This first is that books must be easily accessible at negligible cost to young readers and their families, either because they are already in the home or because the child has access to a well-stocked school — or public library.

Second, potential readers must have primary caregivers who have the inclination, and more importantly the time and energy, to read to them from before they start grade R.

Third, young children must have their own room, or at least their own portion of a room, with good lighting, in which they can regularly experience the silence and privacy required to develop a relationship with reading.

For millions of young South Africans, none of these conditions is in place. For millions more, only one or two of the three are attainable.

In other words, the most effective thing the state can do to create readers is to build the economy sufficiently to put millions of children in a secure and peaceful space, holding a book that cost them nothing, which was first read to them by a caregiver who isn’t absolutely exhausted by leaving for work long before dawn and getting home long after dark.

Still, perfection is the enemy of the good, and there is plenty the state can do in the meantime, like reading the recommendations of Nic Spaull’s 2023 report (which, incidentally, are exactly the same as the recommendations in the 2022 report) and acting on them.

And if it won’t act, because it can’t, it can at least throw money: after all, we know it’s got R900m sitting in the current account just waiting to go.

So what’s the state of the nation? Simple. Four out of five South African pre-teens can’t read, but Ramaphosa’s government doesn’t think it needs serious attention, and Lindiwe Sisulu is still employed.

Read it and weep.