Creator
Rod Amner
Mother-tongue education is failing
The numbers tell a politically uncomfortable truth. A survey of all Grade 4 children in Makhanda’s no-fee public schools this year found that 51% of isiXhosa learners taught in…
The politics of literacy
In November 2025, the R50 million Funda Uphumelele National Survey (FUNS) delivered the first comprehensive measurement of early-grade reading in all official languages. The…
How funding apartheid fails young library users
Lack of funds prevent provinces from carrying out their mandate to manage public library services
Give children high-quality books from Grades R-12: they will likely read them
Research shows that classroom libraries increase reading frequency by 70% compared with centralised libraries
When home tongues clash with classroom words
South Africa’s official African languages mask dozens of dialects, affecting millions, especially in rural areas
How a broken city doubled South Africa’s literacy rate – without the government
Civil society cannot solve the country’s literacy crisis on its own, because the scale is too vast and the resources required too substantial
“R5 billion withheld: The EC school funding crisis
Since 2020, the Eastern Cape Department of Education has retained about R5 billion from the budgets of its poorest schools, ostensibly for “centralised procurement”. Some of that…