Achieving quality schooling for all South Africa’s learners is within our reach

The 2024 McKinsey education report showcases South Africa as one of seven “sustained and outsized improvers” when it comes to the quality of schooling, based on data from international assessment programmes.

These trends excite development economists, given the evidence on how education quality drives economic growth.

South Africa’s trends, highlighted by McKinsey and others, are easily met by disbelief among South Africans accustomed to bad news about our schools.

To be clear, the international data show that the skills of South Africa’s learners remain below the norm for a middle-income country. Yet relatively steep improvements are underway in a context where countries typically experience no change at all.

The inconvenient truth about whole schooling systems is that improving learning is a painfully slow process. It can be sped up in confined groups of schools with a zealous team of interventionists, but entire schooling systems, with their politics and very gradual teacher workforce turnover rates, are Titanics that rarely change course.

Does this mean we need to abandon the hope of quality schooling in our lifetimes? No. Simple simulations show that by sustaining past improvements, reaching the relatively acceptable quality seen in Malaysia today is possible in 10 to 15 years.

A good place to start is understanding how gains over the last couple of decades came about. McKinsey refers to the importance of meals for learners and one-to-one access to books. A clearer curriculum must have played a role. This points to what must be protected as we move ahead.

The Covid pandemic undeniably put a brake on progress, and more should be done to assist learners who were in their initial formative grades during the disruptions. But the pandemic’s impact should not be blown out of proportion. The best account we have points to the damage in South Africa being on par with the world average.

Much of the current emphasis in South Africa is on supporting better teaching methods in the early grades, based on evidence of what works. And a lot of this is about strengthening the use of our nine African languages, given that learning in one’s mother tongue is widely recognised as an essential scaffold for learning using other languages, such as English. 

Universities have begun to realise that in training primary school teachers they need better-focused programmes on how, for instance, to teach mathematics in isiXhosa.

These emerging support innovations need to be scaled up. But to complement support, appropriate mechanisms that hold schools accountable for learning are also needed. Policy work around accountability lags behind that on support.

In a way, this is understandable. Accountability is complex and politically sensitive. Teachers are suspicious about it, often for good reason. Approaches have been tried, only to be aborted.

It is not as if relatively functional accountability systems do not currently exist. Grade 12 national examination results feature prominently in the relationship between secondary schools and education district offices. Even if a narrow focus on pass rates distorts the process somewhat, secondary schools do feel accountable for learning outcomes.

A performance management system whereby teachers and principals at the primary and secondary levels are evaluated by themselves, their peers and their managers – partly to identify professional development needs – is widely implemented.

Data from the evaluations suggest the system facilitates meaningful engagements within the majority of schools, even if in pockets of the schooling system where virtually every teacher gets rated “outstanding”, the system is clearly a futile tick-box exercise.

What remains underdeveloped is accountability for learning outcomes at the primary level. Here a key challenge is generating measures of success which are sufficiently comparable to draw useful conclusions about which schools need most support, and which can be considered exemplary.

It is clear that even with the best intentions and best marking guides, school-based assessments, where teachers themselves design, manage and mark the tests, are not fit for this purpose, even if they are essential for many other reasons to do with effective teaching.

Assessments at the primary level which do generate comparable measures exist in the Western Cape and Gauteng. But in the remaining provinces, accounting for 70% of learners, this remains a critical gap.

Gauteng’s approach, reflected in the Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) programme, is interesting for its relative simplicity, low cost and light administrative burden.

Compared to the Western Cape’s longstanding systemic tests, Gauteng’s programme would be easier to replicate across other provinces. It is similar to the assessment component of Kenya’s nationwide Tusome programme, arguably the best documented and most successful attempt anywhere in the developing world to combine evidence-based support and non-punitive accountability focusing on the earliest grades.

In Gauteng’s programme, which warrants more documentation in the public domain, officials visit schools and select a random sample of around eight Grade 3 learners per school, who are assessed using a simple words-correct-per-minute oral reading exercise.

This type of assessment, while limited in terms of the skills it covers, has been found to provide sufficiently reliable indications of where each school stands. In Gauteng, the focus has been on English, though four African languages have also received attention, and a mathematics version of the programme is being developed.

Results are recorded in a provincial database and are one important element in the interactions between the school and the district office.

Despite the low stakes of Gauteng’s ORF, it has met some resistance from schools. This serves as a reminder of the importance of integrating support and accountability and being transparent about the programme’s purpose.

Kenya’s Tusome includes processes to ensure officials who provide support to teachers and assess children are accountable for the quality of their services. This type of accountability is something South Africa’s teacher unions have insisted on.

South Africa has demonstrated it can address educational quality challenges relatively well. What we do over the next decade in this regard is essential for the longer-term development of the country and for our ability to inspire hope and appropriate practices in other countries. DM

Martin Gustafsson is an associate professor at Stellenbosch University and works extensively for the Department of Basic Education. This article was produced as part of the Teacher Demographic Dividend project (tdd.sun.ac.za).