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News24 Op-Ed: Some PIRLs of wisdom for the education minister - stop planning, start legislating
The inability of 81% of our learners to read for meaning is an indicator of a system failing to provide all the inputs necessary to give children a reasonable opportunity to learn to read, argues Cameron McConnachie.
24 May 2023
By Cameron McConnachie
The 2021 PIRLs (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) literacy results for South African learners found that 81% of our learners cannot read for meaning at the end of the Foundation Phase. This is shocking because of the dire consequences this will have for millions of pupils living in South Africa.
The Right to Read Campaign (#R2R), to be launched in June 2023, recommends four uncontroversial, strategic interventions to improve literacy through binding regulations to remedy the reading crisis and realise the right to basic education for our learners.
Not being able to read for meaning by the age of 10 is a gross violation of a pupil’s constitutional right to a basic education. Our courts have described education as a right that must allow a child to develop to his or her fullest potential and as a primary driver of transformation. How can this happen if a child doesn't understand what they are reading?
The inability of 81% of our learners to read for meaning is an indicator of a system failing to provide all the inputs necessary to give children a reasonable opportunity to learn to read.
South Africa is not short on policies, frameworks and strategies developed in the last 20 years to address the reading crisis, and many of them address the four prerequisites listed above: Drop Everything and Read, Read to Lead, the Early Grade Reading Studies, the 2008 National Reading Strategy, the Eastern Cape's Reading Plan 2019–2023, the Western Cape Reading Strategy 2020–2025. But these are not laws. They represent what national and provincial governments hope to achieve – their good intentions.
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Our campaign
The Right to Read Campaign aims to mobilize civil society and the education sector, as well as society at large, to make early grade literacy a national priority reflected through legislative reform. One of the ways we have identified to do this is to advocate for the development of binding regulations for reading in the first three grades of school.