The writing is on the wall for South Africa’s education system based on the latest report of the 2030 Reading Panel which highlights the alarming gaps in literacy and maths skills in both pupils and teachers.
Consistent with the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls) and last year’s South African systemic evaluation report, the latest panel shows that 80% of grade 3 pupils in the country still cannot read for meaning in any language.
In addition, pupils who speak English and Afrikaans far outpace those who speak African languages, underscoring the deep socioeconomic and linguistic inequalities that have plagued the education system for years.
Equally concerning is that only 32% of teachers demonstrate high levels of mathematics proficiency, a dramatic decline from 98% just a few years ago.
This decline in teacher competency does not bode well for efforts to improve maths outcomes in the country.
The ability to read and write is one of the hallmarks of personal development required for economic progress, political participation and self-expression.
Now in its third iteration, the panel — convened by former deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka and which includes several South African leaders in the education sector — aims to address what needs to change to ensure all children can read by 2030
That date is a mere five years away and despite best-laid intentions, seems an impossible target.
Instead of burying our heads in the sand, the time has come for bold confrontation in tackling a problem which former president Nelson Mandela believed could be the most 'powerful weapon' to reverse our endemic cycle of poverty
Just last month President Cyril Ramaphosa’s state of the nation address reaffirmed the government’s commitment to “ensuring that every child can read for meaning in the foundation phase”.
And while education minister Siviwe Gwarube recently described this vital element of education reform as critical to protecting “South Africa’s greatest asset, our young people”, the question is whether this is the government just paying lip service.
The 2030 Reading Panel is clear: grade R and Early Childhood Development (ECD) education would need an injection of R18bn from the National Treasury, which is twice the estimated 2026/27 budget allocation and five times the current subsidy respectively.
Treasury planned to set aside R10bn for ECD programmes in the draft budget before it was postponed to March 12, amid the debate over whether to increase VAT by two percentage points to 17%.
Two years ago Michael Sachs, adjunct professor at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, said the problem of poor reading outcomes is not rooted in a lack of budget for the department of basic education, but rather a failure to produce value on the investment.
“It’s not hard to budget for things. What is hard is to get political will and leadership to ... execute the plan,” he said.
The solution, as Sachs pointed out, lies in leadership, will and action.
Reading Panel member and previous Gauteng education MEC Mary Metcalfe believes South Africa could take a page out of Peru's book. It had similar levels of poverty and inequality but improved learning outcomes significantly over a short period.
Former Peru education minister Jaime Saavedra said his country confronted its education crisis head-on after coming last in the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment.
“We could have decided to play the results down ... but we didn’t. Instead, we decided to own the problem, to use the results to say, ‘Look, we’re not in trouble. We’re in deep trouble,’” he said.
The truth is the crisis in the education system is deepening and our leaders might as well be illiterate themselves for failing to see the writing on the wall for years now.
Instead of burying our heads in the sand, the time has come for bold confrontation in tackling a problem which former president Nelson Mandela believed could be the most “powerful weapon” to reverse our endemic cycle of poverty.
Without this, unemployment rates among our youth will spiral out of control choking our country's economy and more people will go hungry perpetuating a vicious cycle. This cannot be allowed to continue under our watch.
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