A key conclusion of the round-table talks organised by President Cyril Ramaphosa on how to get growth going is that SA’s education system just has to be fixed. Not only is it a central source of inequality, but without adequate skills the growth potential of the economy will remain capped.
While the country has an abundant supply of low- and medium-skilled workers, only about 5% of South Africans attain a university degree and the stock of graduates consists of little more than 1-million people.
Without addressing this constraint the economy will face a persistent skills shortage and will battle to raise economic growth by way of productivity gains or technological progress. In short, the failure of SA’s education system has become a binding constraint on economic growth.
But the problem is much broader than the economy’s need for high-level skills. In SA, inequality persists across generations in large part because the basic schooling received by most poor children is too inadequate to confer advantage, so they remain mired in poverty. (In SA, if your parents are poor, the odds of your being poor are a heart-breaking 90%.)
Stellenbosch University education researcher Nic Spaull set this out in the clearest terms in a presentation to Ramaphosa during the talks.
The crux of what is wrong with SA’s education system, he says, is that the basic foundations of literacy and numeracy are not being laid in primary school. This means many pupils never get a firm grasp on the first rung of the academic ladder and fall further and further behind. Hence SA’s high drop-out and poor matric pass rates further down the line.
It's hard to believe that just 3% of SA high schools produce more maths and science distinctions than the remaining 97% put together. Of these 200 schools, 92% are former whites-only schools, and all charge significant fees.
At the other extreme are what Spaull calls SA’s “academic wastelands” — those schools that don’t contain a single grade 4 pupil who is able to read, or any in grade 9 able to do maths at the intermediate international benchmark level. That these schools account for nearly half of all SA schools gives an indication of the extent of our education crisis.
Given strong evidence that the best way to improve learning outcomes throughout the system is to focus on literacy and numeracy in the first three years of school, Spaull recommends that SA target its limited education resources on this area.
He urges the president to embark on a national literacy campaign — the “Ramaphosa Reading Plan”. It should deploy “a small army” of reading coaches equipped with graded readers for each learner and lesson plans to show teachers how to use them.
The Eastern Cape education department is not waiting. In 2018 it distributed more than 800,000 isiXhosa-graded anthologies — at a cost of just R8 per colour book — to every foundation-phase child in the province. This followed a successful trial in which 200 schools in the North West and Mpumalanga experienced a 40% improvement in reading after introducing graded readers.
To replicate this in all grade R to grade 3 classes in the country would cost R24m a year, according to Spaull. If reading coaches, lesson plans and other basic classroom resources were included, the cost would rise to about R1.3bn a year to reach half of all primary schools.
Ramaphosa would be mad not to leap at this suggestion but he has a problem: the education budget has become skewed towards higher education by the provision of free tuition which consumes an additional R20bn a year. However, it mostly benefits children who went to good schools.
Spaull’s research would suggest that this bias is all wrong. Primary schools, he says, have become the “ugly step-child in our national saga”. Ramaphosa will have to fix this because as long as half our kids can’t read and do maths, SA will remain mired in inequality and hobbled by a lack of skills. bissekerc@fm.co.za
• Bisseker is Financial Mail assistant editor..