Dear blog readers and South African education folk, After more than a decade at RESEP I’m excited to announce that I’ve now moved to the Gates Foundation as Senior Program Officer within Global Education. Starting this week I’ll be based in Joburg and working with Ben Piper and the rest of the Global Ed team trying to move the needle on Foundational Literacy and Numeracy in Africa. If there’s one thing I am absolutely convinced about, it’s that children need to learn how to read, write and calculate if they are to live dignified lives in the 21st century. It’s difficult to think how we reach ..read more

Is SA’s schooling system the “worst in the world”? Earlier in 2023 the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) released a series of reports claiming that it was. It argued that “we are either last or in the bottom three countries” and that we have “one of the worst-performing education systems in the world.” This is simply not true. There are 193 countries in the world and SA — to its credit — is one of the few that chooses to participate in global assessments such as the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls grade 4) or the Trends in International Mathematics and Scienc ..read more

This week I read Nicholas Kristof’s piece in the New York Times “Mississippi is offering lessons for America on Education” and came across the Barksdale Reading Institute which seems to have a wide collection of really useful resources for teacher training on reading. See here ..read more

This 13min Carte Blanche episode was aired on 30 April 2023 ..read more

On Tuesday the 16th of May 2023 the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) released the findings from their 2021 survey. South Africa was one of 57 countries and regions that participated. is an independently administered, nationally representative assessment of reading comprehension among a sample of Grade 4 learners in South Africa. In 2021 the survey included 321 primary schools and tested 12,426 Grade 4 students between August to November 2021. South Africa has participated in PIRLS four times (2006, 2011, 2016 and 2021). The tests are set by the International Associatio ..read more

About 2,000 years ago Stoic philosopher Seneca was tutoring a Roman emperor and offered him the following advice: “If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favourable.” The lesson here concerns the importance of planning and having a goal to know where you’re going. Unfortunately, when it comes to early grade reading in SA we are a ship at sea without a port in sight or plan in hand.   On Tuesday we learnt that in 2021 81% of SA grade 4s couldn’t read a few simple paragraphs in their home language and answer basic literal questions. This is according to the Progress in ..read more

Getting to SDG4: Useful 2023 UIS report on ‘Trends in learning proficiency in the last 20 years: How close are we to reliable regional and global SDG 4.1.1 trend statistics. Martin Gustafsson’s reports are always great and this is no exception. Sober, evidence-based and useful. EGRA outcomes by gender: Nice new report (May 2023) by Fonseca et al out of RTI on “Girls have academic advantages and so do boys: A multi-country analysis of gender differences in early grade reading and mathematics outcomes. The Latin-americanisation of SA schools: Last month Johnny Steinberg wrote an interesting op ..read more

Last week Funda Wande released the midline evaluation of their Limpopo Randomised Control Trial, evaluated by Prof Cally Ardington from UCT. In essence the intervention is 120 schools split into 3 arms of 40 schools each: a control arm, a Materials+training arm, and Materials+training+Teacher-Assistant arm (each teacher received a full-time Teacher Assistant). Although the graphic says “Materials only” – the report shows that actually there was also centralised teacher training (of 4 days per term – 2 for literacy and 2 for numeracy). The intervention is both a literacy intervention (Funda W ..read more

On the 7th of February we held the second 2030 Reading Panel meeting. The Panel is comprised of 18 respected South Africans who meet annually to review progress towards the Presidential goal of “All South African children being able to read for meaning by age 10 by 2030”, and provides implementable systemic recommendations to government. Key findings from the 2023 Background Report launched on 7 February 2023: 82% of SA Grade 4 kids can’t read, up from 78% pre-pandemic: Before the pandemic it was estimated that 78% of Grade 4 learners could read for meaning (PIRLS 2016), new research based o ..read more

There are lots of things that are wrong with South Africa at the moment. As I type this our parliament is in the process of deciding whether President Ramaphosa should be subject to an impeachment inquiry. But even when things are dark (literally), and the prospects for improvement are dim, South Africa still has a lot of things going for it. I’ll mention just one of them: a thriving community of scholars who give a shit about the country, who want to do impactful research, and who really care about improving the life chances of poor kids. Not many people know that before COVID hit, South Afr ..read more