Education reform needed to tackle kids’ low literacy

South Africa’s deepening literacy crisis is proof that the education system needs significant reform to address low literacy rates of children, following a report by the World Bank.

SA reportedly has an adult literacy rate of 87% – ranking lower than other developing countries such as Mexico and Brazil.

However, education expert Wayne Hugo said this crisis should be attributed to Covid. Hugo said SA has been making strides in its literacy rates. The overall trend in functional literacy has been consistently going down the late 1980s and although there’s been improvements compared to years before, it was now staggering due to the effects of Covid.

“So, if you look at the trend what you will see is that initially in the 1990s there was a dramatic improvement, we were really doing well, but as we got to almost like over 90% of the population being functionally literate it got harder and harder to keep producing the same amazing results,” he said.

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He said after this period the trend slowed and got even worse when Covid hit and when there was a downturn in the economy.

“A huge amount of [pupils] dropped out of the system or had to learn at home and in both cases, landed up in a situation where [pupils] that were reading at around Grade 4 level three years are now reading at Grade 3 level,” Hugo added.

“In other words, we’ve lost around about a year in terms of learning to read and the development which was made because of Covid.”

Eight out of 10 Grade 4 pupils cannot read for meaning

According to Stats SA in 2021, 10.5% of people aged 20+ were functionally illiterate, which is an 18% point decrease between 2002 and 2021, (functional illiteracy refers to those who have either received no schooling or who have not completed Grade 7 yet.)

This after International Literacy Day, which was commemorated on 8 September, once again shone a spotlight on SA’s poor literacy rate, which showed that eight out of 10 Grade 4 pupils cannot read for meaning.

However, Hugo noted that experts and the education department were aware that this was a crisis and have now made it a national priority by creating programmes, which were currently underway, to start to improve literacy in schools.

“Now, the baseline thing you’ve got do – and we are already doing this – is providing really good reading materials, in all our languages,” he said.

“So it used to be that children could only learn to read in English and Afrikaans, books like Jack and Jill and those kinds of things, they were only in English and Afrikaans and the Zulu, Xhosa and Tswana ones were based on the English ones.

“And so they were terrible, because they didn’t work. But we’ve now done the research and now producing these learning books in all languages and that is a huge improvement.”

Meanwhile, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (Unicef) revealed that 10 years of early grade reading studies have shown that home language-focused structured pedagogical interventions make an impact, which shows that SA is on the right track.

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Unicef SA partnered with the European Union to South Africa, the department of basic education and the National Education Collaboration Trust to launch the Reading & Leadership Strengthening in South African Schools initiative in 2021, to tackle illiteracy by reaching 292 000 pupils.

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Five most literate nations

• Uzbekistan (99.99%)
• Ukraine (99.97%)
• San Marino (99.92%)
• Latvia (99.89%)
• Estonia (99.89%)

– World Population Review