JONATHAN JANSEN | Pirls of wisdom: poorest schools are again let down by government

There is no other way of saying this — the announcement by Progress in International Literacy Study (Pirls) 2021 on Tuesday has revealed that South African education is in an even worse crisis than we thought. In 2016, according to the same study, a staggering 78% of grade 4 pupils could not read for meaning. In 2021, wait for it, the situation got measurably worse and now 81% of the same grade year do not understand the words they are reading. In other words, a drop of 0.8 years of learning.

Now before government officials try to spin the un-spinnable, let’s get a few things out of the way. One, students wrote in their home language (for example, isiZulu) so you cannot blame English for the problem. Two, this is a nationally representative and independently administered sample of the 1,127,877 grade 4 children in our schools in 2021, so there was no attempted government interference as with the matric results. Third, this is a comparative study and once again South Africa placed dead last with the largest decline in learning losses of 33 participating countries; compared with others, South Africa falls flat on its face. Fourth, all countries were affected by the pandemic and the subsequent learning losses and yet South Africa experienced the worst drop in reading outcomes; so you can’t blame the pandemic.

What is going on? Curriculum expert Ursula Hoadley of UCT observes: “There has been no attempt to recoup time to remediate learning losses,” and finds that “the insistence on a largely business-as-usual approach ... fails to address the severe educational impact of the pandemic, especially on learners in the poorest communities”. There you have it. English and Afrikaans schools did not experience a decline in reading outcomes; most African schools did. In other words, the poorest schools were once again neglected by this government, thereby increasing inequality across the educations sector. Absolutely shameful.

I really hope that once and for all we will now stop this fatal obsession with the matric results; its political uses to show that ‘the system’ is improving are now finally exposed as a sham.

The minister’s response to this disastrous announcement was disgraceful. Listen to this, according to a report quoting her in TimesLIVE: “We must all prioritise and devote adequate attention to enhancing learners’ reading ability for meaning.” We? Oh no, minister, you don’t get to pass off this abysmal mess on an amorphous “we”. You are in charge of 26,000 schools. You take responsibility. In any normal country, the president fires the minister because, not only did our reading outcomes not improve, South Africa went backwards in what experts are calling “a generational catastrophe” and “the loss of a decade of progress”. Over and over again, you have failed the children of the poorest among us. Now you must go.

I really hope that once and for all we will now stop this fatal obsession with the matric results; its political uses to show that “the system” is improving are now finally exposed as a sham. The entire school system is built and now collapsing on faulty foundations and that is why half the children do not even make it to grade 12.

When other countries like Colombia, India (Gujarat in particular), Brazil and Chile experienced crises in reading, they put billions into fixing the problem. South Africa still does not have a national budget dedicated to resolving the reading crisis, believe it or not. Only the Western Cape set aside R1.2bn for recouping learning losses through its Back on Track programme. For the rest of the country, business as usual.

I have come to the sober conclusion that this government is not going to pivot towards the foundation phase, with dedicated reading budgets and substantial planning expertise to change these outcomes, without a change in leadership. In the meantime, I call on every philanthropic organisation to urgently shift their funding focus towards fixing the problem of literacy (and numeracy) in the foundation years by setting bold and ambitious goals for example, every child reading for meaning by the end of grade 1. There is evidence from the Eastern Cape that anthologies of graded readers make a difference in reading outcomes, given that most children do not have basic reading texts in their mother tongue in school or at home; invest in these materials. Close the schools, if necessary, but train teachers with workbooks and teacher guides that show them how to teach reading effectively in the foundation years. And in the poorest schools, deploy teacher coaches to support teachers on how to teach reading; it works.

If the Pirls results do not completely refocus our efforts on building strong foundations in the school system, everybody suffers not least employers faced with employing illiterate workers in an economy more and more dependent on skilled labour with hi-tech capabilities.

* Most of the data is drawn from the summary provided by SU colleagues, Pirls 2021 Overview of Key findings.