Breakthrough for early learning as Education Department embraces non-formal venues

The Department of Basic Education’s new strategy for early learning displays the type of thinking that could get us out of the inequality trap. This human-capital-wasting trap is well known: over half of our children are not ready to learn by the time they start school.

They begin at a disadvantage and fall further and further behind. Ultimately, about 40% of learners drop out of school before completing Grade 12, joining the ranks of the millions of unemployed who in turn cannot afford to send their own children to preschools.

The department’s new strategy projects the need for 115,000 new early learning venues for 2.9 million 3-5-year-olds by 2030, but it acknowledges that we cannot wait for new buildings, and these children must be reached now in community-based centres, informal playgroups and homes of day mothers.

Until better facilities are in place, we must extend access to quality early learning in every setting where children are being cared for.

Implicit in this new approach is recognition of the role of the informal sector in growing the social economy. Not only can children learn in informal settings, but emergent early childhood development (ECD) practitioners can be upskilled and can earn a better living through a combination of parent fees and public subsidies. This means that expanding ECD can contribute to brighter children and more jobs at the same time.

Children who participate in quality early learning programmes are more likely to thrive at school and develop their full potential. Yet, only about half of the poorest 40% of 3-to-4 year-olds attend such programmes, up from roughly two-fifths a decade ago. At this rate, it will take another 40 years for all poor children to benefit from out-of-home early learning.

Funding and quality learning

This slow rate of progress is due to two main factors. First, public funding for early childhood development is seriously inadequate. Second, the focus has been on the ECD facility rather than the quality of the early learning experience for children.

Many of our poorest children are excluded from receiving subsidies because they attend programmes in buildings that don’t meet the norms and standards required of registered ECD facilities. Health and safety concerns are paramount, but the irony is that these children would be healthier and safer eating and learning in a small corrugated-iron shack with a fenced-off outdoor area than playing on the streets while their mothers look for work.

Early learning programmes like SmartStart have shown that it is possible to provide quality early learning for children in structures in informal settlements and rural areas that don’t meet the standards of a formal ECD centre. Not only are these children kept safe in these basic facilities, but they also make significant strides in their physical, socio-emotional and brain development.

These evaluation findings from SmartStart and other early learning programmes in South Africa have major implications for the way we design and fund them.

Make no mistake, a minimum threshold of health and safety is non-negotiable and an important prerequisite for these programmes. Beyond that, however, we should be more concerned with the quality of the child’s experience than the existence of a separate kitchen with an extractor fan, as some municipalities require.

While other local authorities are not as stringent, few have adopted guidelines for provision that reflect the reality of where most poor children live.

Read more in Daily Maverick: South Africa making progress towards early childhood development goals, education officials say

It is recognition of this reality that makes the Department of Basic Education’s new strategy for ECD so exciting. Its leaders now clearly realise that we have been trapped by our own thinking. It is the child, and not the facility structure, that should centre our efforts to expand access to quality early learning.

While ECD centres are ideal and can house a lot of children, they are expensive to build and maintain, and it will take many years to finance and construct enough of them.

The National Integrated Policy for ECD of 2015 sought to break the monopoly of funding for centre-based models of provision, but it was never put into practice. The number of children subsidised by the state in ECD facilities has only grown from 488,000 to 627,000 over the past decade — that’s still just over a quarter of all eligible 3-to-5-year-olds.

A big reason for this is the difficulty practitioners have in meeting all the requirements to register their ECD centre to access state funding, a challenge that can now be overcome by shifting our attention to what’s most important, namely the child.

Critical development

The DBE’s new strategy also emphasises the importance of child development in the first two years of life, when cognitive and language development are at their fastest. It acknowledges the limited role of the school system in this age group, emphasising instead the importance of parents, working with the Departments of Health and Social Development, and forging new partnerships with civil society.

The biggest weakness of the strategy is its lack of detail on nutritional support, even though it is described as a critical feature of high-quality early learning programmes.

This weakness is unsurprising, given the state’s broader failure to secure adequate nutrition for children, but we hope to see an extension of the school feeding scheme — in an appropriate form — into early learning programmes as well.

Of course, all these plans need more money, but it is encouraging that the government is now looking for the most cost-effective strategies that centre on the child and recognise the role of the informal sector for greater reach and impact.

Private foundations such as those we represent will never be able to fund programmes at sufficient scale, but we can show how things can be done better and work with the government to make an even stronger case for public investment in early childhood development. DM

David Harrison is the CEO of the DG Murray Trust and Bernadette Moffat is the Executive Director of the ELMA Philanthropies (Africa), the advisory service to the ELMA Group of Foundations.