Three successive systemic studies reveal that roughly 72% of South Africa’s learners cannot read at an age-appropriate level. Two eminent economists, Professor Servaas van den Berg and Martin Gustafsson, confirm this in their recent study. They found that South Africa would be R550-billion better off if we could achieve the literacy level expected of a middle-income country such as we are.
This means that, if we get literacy right, it is possible that the health of the nation will be improved; crime will be reduced; South Africa’s businesses will be 25% more profitable; more adults will enter the workplace able to assimilate skills training; and parents, because they have the ability to read, will encourage their children to reach a higher level of education.
In short, we would all be substantially better off, healthier, safer and possibly happier.
There are solutions. The policies and curricula are in place, the Foundations for Learning campaign is mandated and the South African Education Department has prioritised literacy and numeracy as key focus areas that demand immediate improvement.
South Africa can produce literate graduates from the system if we all work together. Raising literacy levels in South Africa is in all our interests. It calls for all citizens, all institutions, as well as the private and public sector to commit to a coordinated effort to be part of the solution.
We can do it!
South Africans working together have achieved so much already. With unity and shared purpose, we successfully had a miraculous and peaceful change of government and our first democratic elections; the Rugby World Cup, when the beloved President Nelson Mandela led the way by his inspired leadership, changing attitudes and bringing South Africans of all races together wherever they happened to be in the world, and the recent Fifa World Cup which, again, demonstrated our pride in our country.
Surely a successful endeavour to ensure a substantially higher level of literacy for our children will meet with an even more determined national response?
Special initiatives are necessary
The place to start is, preferably, at pre-school level or at the latest at the foundation phase of primary school since it is essential to acquire the ability to read and write well as early as possible to achieve successful schooling for career advancement.
The call for a special initiative is not unique to South Africa. As part of the millennium goals, Unesco recognised the urgent need for the eradication of illiteracy, with a concomitant drive towards universal primary education by 2015.
“Virtually every country has had to launch campaigns or special initiatives to achieve a higher literacy rate,” says academic Dr Robin Lee, because “international experience shows that even in the most developed countries in the world it cannot be assumed that primary school education will routinely achieve even 80% of literacy among learners.”
The kind of strategy that is needed is systematic and systemic. As educationist Barbara MacGilchrist (1997) emphasises, “short-term, uncoordinated initiatives to raise standards do not work,” she writes in her research paper, Reading and achievement — some lessons for the future” (Research papers in Education, published by Routledge, 1997).
The key word: opportunity
“We create our own brains based on the learning opportunities and experiences that we seek out and that are provided for us.” (Bussis, et al, 1985 and Solsten, 1993)
In simplistic terms, the difference between situations in which learners are poor readers and writers and those who become successful can be encapsulated in one word: opportunity. It is obvious that schools in more affluent suburbs on the whole produce better results. They have better resources, more highly trained teachers and parents who read, who have print materials in their home and a community environment.
South Africa’s challenge is to vastly improve the abilities of learners who come from the poorer sectors of our society, and close the gap between the different groups — advantaged and disadvantaged — not by reducing the necessary support from schools which are better resourced and lowering standards but by harnessing the support of all sectors and all communities to provide the kind of assistance the poorer schools need in order to make it progressively more possible for them to produce acceptable literacy results.
There are a considerable number of well-documented studies available for us to review which provide examples of successful intervention to raise literacy levels.
However, the common ingredients in the studies are that learners are provided with focused and effective opportunities to learn to read and write in an enabling environment.
The key factors which vary to some extent in all the studies are:
- Supportive communities;
- Maximum time on the task of literacy teaching and learning;
- Schools in which efficient language teaching routinely takes place;
- Relevant resources readily available and effectively utilised;
- Standards set and maintained by the staff working together as a team;
- A sense of shared ownership;
- Assessment to ensure that the standards set are reached;
- Staff and learners are regularly mentored; and
- Continuous recognition of success.
To create a climate of change and bridge the existing gaps so that the needs of the children come first will involve the considerable effort of all South Africans, but especially the teaching community which has the key role to play since it is they who are in the classrooms every day.
In the absence of an educated parent community, which is the case in many townships and rural situations, and with the high percentage of orphans in our society, the school must be the “reading parent” for learners and provide or organise additional opportunities for reading and writing which the home environment lacks.
The teaching community will need effective practical training, continuous mentoring, support and motivation in order to fulfil their challenging role. It is in this context that the unions and teacher organisations are important since it is their leadership, their guidance and motivation that lies at the heart of teachers’ attitudes.
School governing bodies and parents (even if they are illiterate or semi-literate) have a valuable part to play and need guidance on how to do so.
The energies and resources of the private sector, all government departments as well as civil society need to be harnessed in order to provide the opportunities to which South African children are entitled.
This is an extract from The Literacy Crisis: Every Child Matters: Reflections on possible solutions, by Cynthia Hugo, READ Educational Trust