The Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) released a series of reports on South Africa’s education system today, calling for an urgent revamp of the country’s public education system.
These include the appointment of a new Minister of Basic Education, and Director-General.
The CDE’S Executive Director, Ann Bernstein, said a leadership change is needed urgently to move South Africa off the bottom of international tables for mathematics, science and reading.
“The President speaks of a ‘silent revolution’, while the Minister talks of a ‘system on the rise’. The truth is that we face a silent crisis in our schools. South Africa has one of the worst performing education systems in the world,” Bernstein said.
Some of the key recommendations in the CDE’s report focus on five areas for action to improve education outcomes:
1. Tackle corruption and state capture in education through the prohibition of cadre deployment, and introducing measures that remove SADTU’s stranglehold on education departments.
2. Raise accountability levels by bringing back the Annual National Assessment (ANA) tests for Grades 1 to 9, reinvigorate an independent National Education Evaluation and Development Unit (NEEDU), and giving principals more power over the appointment and management of teachers in their schools.
3. Improve teacher performance by introducing higher standards of teacher training, more effective support for existing teachers and urgently recruit skilled foreign teachers in areas of shortage (maths and science).
4. Install fresh leadership in public education. South Africa needs a new Minister of Basic Education, DG and top team at national and provincial levels to achieve system wide reform. The President’s full support for tough political decisions is essential.
5. Set realistic national and provincial performance goals. Stretch targets are required to move off the bottom of international tests. Ensuring all 10-year-olds can read for meaning by 2030 is an excellent goal, but this presidential aspiration dating back to 2019 must be accompanied by a plan, a budget and regular reporting on progress.
South Africa achieved improvements in learning outcomes between the early 2000s and mid-2010’s but, according to the CDE’s research, this hopeful trajectory had not been sustained.
According to the report:
• 2021: after a year of school, more than 50% of Grade 1 learners did’t know all the letters in the alphabet
• 2020/ 2021: Covid 19 lockdowns devastated learning in SA (as elsewhere)
• 2019: 62% of Grade 5 learners did not have “basic mathematical knowledge”.
• 2016: 78% of Grade 4 learners could not read for meaning – in any language.
Bernstein said that experts believed that the average 10-year-old knows less than the average 9-year-old did before the pandemic.
“South Africa’s comparative performance is shocking. When our learners take international tests, we are either last or in the bottom three countries. Even more devastating, while other countries test Grade 4s, we test Grade 5s; when they test Grade 8s, we test Grade 9s,” she added.
The report also found that many countries poorer than South Africa outperform us in tests including Morocco, Egypt, Georgia, Kosovo and Albania. According to the World Bank, South Africa is the world’s biggest under-performer in education among countries with a similar GDP per capita.
“We need to ask why SA’s schooling system performs so badly,” Bernstein said. “An accurate diagnosis is a precondition for deciding how to fix this system.”
The poverty of learners and their families as well as ongoing infrastructural deficits all play a role, the report found.
However, critical structural issues had to be addressed, Bernstein said.
Four out of five teachers in public schools lack the content knowledge and skills to teach their subjects. The CDE reported that in maths for example, proficiency levels of South African teachers ranked at 41%, far below that of their peers in Kenya which stood at 95%, and in Zimbabwe at 87%.
And South Africa had the highest teacher absenteeism rate of all SADC countries.
“There is little accountability in our vast education system. This is a primary reason for teacher underperformance.
“The education system has been compromised by corruption, cadre deployment and too many incompetent staff members: an inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy fails to give teachers the support they need and does not hold them accountable for poor performance,” Bernstein said.
The CDE has called for civil society, business, political parties, parents and the public to put pressure on government and push for system wide reforms that significantly improve the quality of teaching in the classroom.
Education