To fix reading, we must flood SA homes with books

Last month, South Africans were shocked to learn that 81% of our Grade 4 children cannot read for meaning in any language.

There are many contributing factors: Covid-19 disruptions, inadequate teacher training, scarce learning materials, children learning in overcrowded classrooms on empty stomachs.

But one of the problems would be quick, easy and cheap to solve: we could make sure that every child owns at least 10 books by the age of five.

The 2023 National Reading Survey, launched by the Nal’ibali Trust on 13 June, found that two-thirds of homes with children under age ten do not have a single children’s book, and only 10% have more than ten books. This means most South African children arrive at school without important early home learning experiences.

The benefits of book ownership, especially in the early years, are well established. A 35-country study found that children aged three to five with at least one picture book at home were nearly twice as likely to be on track in early literacy and numeracy than children with no books.

A meta-analysis of 27 countries, including SA, found that children growing up with many books complete three more years of schooling than children with no books, regardless of parents’ education, occupation and class. In homes with only a few books, every extra book provides greater benefits to children — and those benefits are largest in the most disadvantaged homes.

I have heard many people say, “Just giving people books doesn’t mean they will be used”. But Nal’ibali’s National Reading Survey found that when parents have books at home, they are much more likely to read with children. International research backs this up: book ownership programmes such as the Imagination Library in the US and Canada, which mails children one free book a month from birth until they start school, and BookStart in the UK, which gives book packs to babies, find that when children own books, they are more interested in reading and have better literacy-related skills before and during their early school years.

What about digital resources? Thousands of open-licensed children’s books and stories are available online in SA, far more than we had a decade ago, with a wide variety in African languages. But our survey found that while half of adults who live with children read with them, very few use digital reading material. More awareness of free stories on sites such as Nal’ibali and Book Dash might increase those figures — but while digital resources can complement printed books for young kids, they cannot replace them.

The rate of brain development and new neural connections is most rapid in a child’s first two years of life. But many children do not interact with the education system until they reach Grade R. Just more than half of SA children aged two to five are enrolled in an early learning programme. 

If children are not exposed to books and stories before they reach school, they have missed a critical window to build cognitive and socio-emotional skills that will set them up for success.

And although access to books is a key precondition for learning to read, book ownership is traditionally viewed as a problem for the private sector to solve. This might work in wealthy countries with well-established reading cultures, where most schools and communities have well-stocked libraries and most families can afford to buy books for their children. But in a country such as SA, it will take a concerted, collaborative effort to fix this problem. 

Over the next ten years we should commit to making sure every child owns ten books by the age of five, and 20 books by the age of ten.

We could do this by instituting an early-years book ownership programme, run by the public services parents most consistently use in children’s first few years of life. When parents get a birth certificate or a childhood vaccination, they should go home with a book. This would cost an estimated R118m a year.

Then, when children reach the foundation phase, the department of basic education could provide reader and storybook collections to each child. Many of these resources have already been developed and this has in fact already happened: in 2019-20, children in the Eastern Cape who received graded reader anthologies showed a 20% improvement in reading fluency. Unfortunately, the programme did not continue. Rolling it out nationally would cost an estimated R58m per year — just R4m more than Eskom’s daily budget for diesel in 2023. 

Every classroom should have a well-stocked classroom library, and children need to be allowed to take books home and read them. This is uncommon because books are such precious resources that teachers fear they will be lost or damaged. If books are abundant, this fear will dissipate. And if book borrowing is part of what the education system monitors and measures, it can become a routine practice rather than “extra work” or a “nice to have”.

And we can align the heroic efforts of civil society groups — which distributed more than 6-million printed children’s books and newspapers in 2022 — to ensure we are reaching all of our children.

These books need to be in the languages children speak and understand. They need to be attractive, appealing and culturally relevant. They should include wordless picture books, which are especially good for young children and can be “read” by anyone, even caregivers who are not confident readers themselves.

If we can flood SA with books over the next ten years, our children will have a fighting chance. We can’t afford not to do it.

• Katie Huston is an independent consultant specialising in literacy, education and early childhood development. Via email