South Africa

South Africa, Maverick Citizen, Op-eds

A wake-up call for education: Lessons from Peru's successful literacy reform journey

27 May 2025

A deep dive into the data behind the poor scores of South Africa’s primary school learners in reading assessments — Part 1.

South Africa got a sharp wake-up call in 2023 when the results of an international reading literacy survey found that 80% of our Grade 4s couldn’t read for meaning. We came stone last in a group of 57 countries that did the test.

Ten years earlier in 2013, Peru got a similar shock when the poor performance of its public schools in an international reading and mathematics assessment made national media headlines.

Peru acted quickly to start to turn things around, said Jaime Saavedra, Peru’s former minister of education, now at the World Bank as Director of Human Development for Latin America and the Caribbean. He described how his country made “tangible short-term gains” at a meeting of the 2030 Reading Panel in February.

It focused on four lines of action.

Improve the social standing of teachers because “teachers are the central partners in any education reform process”.

Learning: Make quality interventions to improve teaching methods, strategies and resources. For Peru, this included providing learning material in 19 local languages.

Effective management: “It needs a high-quality bureaucracy to drive change at scale”, from school management upwards.

Improve school infrastructure.

Through this approach the percentage of Grade 2 learners with a satisfactory achievement level in reading improved from 33% in 2013 to 50% in 2016, he noted, showing a chart of the results.

What can we learn from Pirls?

The most well-known and widely reported evidence that South Africa’s children are not learning to read at school is the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement’s (IEA’s) 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls).

South Africa is one of only three African countries that participates in Pirls, the other two are Morocco and Egypt. Both of them did better than South Africa.

Morocco and Egypt are lower-middle income countries whereas South Africa is an upper-middle income country and should, in theory, have the resources to do better. Brazil and Turkey, which are upper middle-income countries, both scored better than South Africa, although they were also in Pirls’ bottom 10.

Only one country in South America participated, Brazil. Peru’s shock reading results were from a different survey, the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa).

For the Pirls study, the minimum result indicating that learners can “read for meaning” in easy texts is the “low” benchmark of 400 points. This entails retrieving basic information sufficient to answer straightforward questions about the text.

The median percentage of Grade 4 learners around the world reaching this minimum benchmark was 94%, but only 19.5% of South African learners managed it. Only 6% of South African learners exceeded this skill level and reached the intermediate benchmark (+475 points), meaning they can begin to interpret and integrate information about the text. Just 3% of our learners reached the “high benchmark” (+550 points), which means they proved their ability to interpret and evaluate complex texts.

Setting targets

This is not the first time South Africa’s learners have done badly in international reading surveys. In 2019, President Cyril Ramaphosa set a target that in 10 years “every 10-year-old will be able to read for meaning”. Hence the 2030 goal.

The 2021 Pirls results were a big setback, although to be fair they took place immediately after the Covid-19 pandemic, which disrupted schooling around the world. It’s still doubtful that South Africa will meet the 2030 target.

You might even wonder why South Africa participates in Pirls at all if it’s just going to make us look bad?

At a seminar on reading literacy in 2023, former education minister Angie Motshekga answered that question when she said Pirls established a global standard for reading comprehension, and “as a developing country, we are still on a journey to reach these international benchmarks”.

Yet, South Africa stopped doing local standardised assessments that measure how well learners read in primary schools a decade ago when the Annual National Assessments (ANAs) were halted.

The optimistic view is that even if our learners don’t do that well in international tests, at least there is a will in the government to do something about it. We could take it as a positive sign that a quote by management consultant Peter Drucker, “What gets measured gets improved”, has been popping up in Department of Basic Education slide decks recently.

Local benchmarks

In 2022, a year after the Pirls assessment was done, a local survey was carried out. Called the South African Systemic Evaluation, it involved 56,650 learners from 1,688 schools. It looked at the reading and mathematics abilities of Grade 3, 6 and 9 learners across the country. It is being touted as a replacement for the Annual National Assessments.

The Department of Basic Education released the results of the South African Systemic Evaluation only in December 2024.

The way the South African Systemic Evaluation measures reading proficiency is not exactly the same as the Pirls assessment so they’re not directly comparable; however, the results show a very similar and worrying pattern in that only 20% of learners in Grade 3 were able to achieve the level of reading skills they are expected to reach in that grade.

In the South African Systemic Evaluation, the reading skills and knowledge learners are expected to be proficient at are divided into four performance levels. The first level, named “emerging”, is where learners are just beginning to develop the skills required for Grade 3-level reading.

The next level up, known as “evolving”, is where learners are beginning to construct and adapt what they have learned. The third level, called “enhancing”, is where learners demonstrate that they actually have the required skills, are able to apply those skills and show they are moving towards independent learning.

At the highest “extending” level, learners show an advanced understanding of the knowledge and skills required, apply their knowledge in creative ways and can learn independently.

Learners need to have “enhancing”-level skills to meet the requirements of Grade 3. Only one in five of the Grade 3s who took part achieved that level.

It’s important to recognise that it’s not all learners at all schools who can’t read. In the Pirls tests some learners did well, while others did very badly.

Language, location and socioeconomic circumstances have a role to play in shaping children’s reading skills.

What does language have to do with it?

South Africa is one of the few countries that tested in multiple languages for Pirls in 2021. The assessment material was translated into all 11 official languages. Afrikaans and English test scores were much higher than the other nine languages. They were the only two languages where the average scores were relatively close to 400, the minimum required to show an ability to read for meaning in easy texts.

Learners who completed the assessment in African languages scored below the national average of 288 points. The ones who scored the lowest were assessed in Xitsonga (223), Sepedi (216) and Setswana (211).

The results of the local South African Systemic Evaluation survey showed a similar pattern in the Grade 3s tested. Where the language of learning and teaching at school is English or Afrikaans, learners were better at reading.

Education inequality

Why are children who were tested in English or Afrikaans doing so much better than those who tested in other African languages? This data can be misleading and give rise to the misconception that Afrikaans- and English-speaking children are better at reading.

But looking deeper into the data reveals the crux of the issue, that in South Africa, the language of teaching and learning also links to the insufficiently addressed historical inequality in schooling.

While the students who completed the Pirls test in English did much better than those who tested in African languages, most actually have a different home language. This indicates that many parents may choose to send their children to English schools because they are better resourced.

That 30 years after the end of apartheid, Afrikaans and English schools are still better resourced is not just a perception, but is evident in the data.

African language schools are far more likely to be categorised as disadvantaged, whereas about a third of English schools are categorised as advantaged, much more than schools of any other language.

Looking at the reading achievement results in relation to the socioeconomic condition of the school points to the impact that an under-resourced school can have on a child’s reading ability.

Of the 9,842 South African schools surveyed in the Pirls study, 73% are categorised as socioeconomically disadvantaged (based on school principals’ reports). The average reading level for children from these schools was 263 points whereas the reading level for the children from affluent schools was 420, which is above the 400-point Pirls benchmark.

While the effect of socioeconomic context on reading level is a reality in most countries according to the Pirls Report, the problem is particularly significant in South Africa, where socioeconomic strata often affect the language of schooling and testing.

Poor schools

Public schools in South Africa are divided into five quintiles that reflect the socioeconomic circumstances of the communities the schools service. Schools in the poorest communities are classified quintile 1 and those in the more affluent communities are classified quintile 5. Schools in quintiles 1 to 3 are the so-called “no-fee schools”, where learners do not have to pay school fees, and schools in quintiles 4 and 5 are fee-paying schools.

The results of the South African Systemic Evaluation show that children who go to quintile 5 schools are far more likely to be able to read at the level required for Grade 3 and that the reading skills of most of the children in quintile 1, 2 and 3 schools were found to be below the required level.

Learners from the poorest backgrounds, who attend the no-fee schools (quintiles 1, 2 and 3) have the least access to resources. This highlights the inequality in South Africa’s education and the need for targeted interventions and resource allocations in no-fee schools, researchers say.

Something else to bear in mind is that girls do better at reading than boys across all quintiles, but particularly in poorer schools. Interventions are also needed to support boys’ reading development.

Provincial differences

The South African Systemic Evaluation survey highlighted differences in the reading scores between the provinces. In the Western Cape nearly 40% of the Grade 3s tested showed they could read to the “enhancing” level of reading proficiency required for Grade 3. In Gauteng, close to 30% did.

In the other provinces fewer than 20% of children could read at the “enhancing” level.

In the Pirls test scores, the provinces that performed poorly were basically the same, although the Eastern Cape replaced the Northern Cape in the bottom four.

Not an unsolvable problem

Jaime Saavedra, who was Peru’s education minister when the country took steps to change its poor reading and maths results, had a simple yet profound closing message for his presentation at the 2030 Reading Panel workshop.

Public officials need to take their jobs seriously. They have an immense responsibility because they are “making decisions that can define the careers of thousands of people and the experiences of millions of children”, he said. “If you are not afraid of that responsibility, you might not know what you are getting into.”

Progress is possible, even in the short term, he said. But you need a sense of urgency, because “as we speak, there is a child in a classroom who is not learning. For many, we are already late.” DM

This project was completed with the support of the Henry Nxumalo Foundation for Investigative Journalism.

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