EDITORIAL: Writing’s on the wall. Can anyone read it?

The revelation that the pandemic wiped out more than a decade of progress in reading in South Africa is devastating, but we can’t say we weren’t warned. The only mystery is why the government hasn’t already instituted a massive remedial programme.

The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls), conducted every five years, found in 2016 that 78% of South African grade 4s could not read for meaning in any language. The 2021 figure, released this week, deteriorated to 81%. This takes children’s proficiency in reading back to where it was in 2011.

It means that the average grade 4 in South Africa in 2021 was almost a year behind where the average grade 4 was in 2016. These learning losses will have serious knock-on effects as children progress through their school careers.

In fact, South Africa experienced the largest decline in reading outcomes between 2016 and 2021 (-32 points) of all 33 countries and regions surveyed by Pirls.  

If this evidence of a huge systemic failure in education doesn’t spark a public outcry and jolt Angie Motshekga’s sclerotic department of basic education into action, nothing will.

The FM has been warning for some time that if South Africa continues to ignore its illiteracy time bomb, it dooms children to ignorance and the economy to failure. Not only is education the surest way out of poverty, but without adequate skills the economy’s growth will forever be capped.

Stellenbosch University associate professor Nic Spaull describes the latest Pirls results as a “generational catastrophe”. He believes some of the losses can be reversed but only with a huge, concerted national effort.

Yet even though South Africa has known from provincial test results that Covid laid waste to early-grade reading and maths, the government has done precious little to orchestrate a catch-up plan.

The exception is the Western Cape (South Africa’s best-performing province in the 2021 Pirls), which added 60 extra hours of teaching time in these subjects for grade 1-3 pupils in the second part of last year. Last week it built on these efforts by launching the three-year, R1.2bn “BackOnTrack” programme that aims to reach thousands more pupils up to matric.

The Western Cape acted when its 2022 systemic test results confirmed that learning outcomes “fell off a cliff” during Covid. It faces “a full-blown learning crisis”, says education MEC David Maynier, with more than half of pupils in grades 3, 6 and 9 unable to achieve a basic pass score for maths and reading — and this is South Africa’s strongest province.

The BackOnTrack programme will involve Saturday classes, holiday camps, after-school tutoring, subject-specific support for grade 10s and 12s, additional time for language and maths, teacher training and professional development, and the use of e-learning. Even parents are being roped in. They will be able to access family numeracy programmes, educational resources and workshops on how to support learning at home.

Experts say South Africa’s dismal reading performance is related to ineffective teacher training, poor teaching, inadequate support and an absence of classroom reading resources. But perhaps the biggest obstacle is a lack of political will; a state that fails to back lofty promises with scaled-up, budgeted programmes.

The Pirls results should galvanise the government into treating the literacy crisis with the urgency it deserves. After all, a nation that isn’t willing to invest in reading is one that is failing to invest in its own future. Quite simply, a nation that cannot read is a nation that cannot succeed.