Sustaining system-wide educational improvement in South Africa

Sustaining system-wide educational improvement in South Africa


By Kholosa Nonkenge and Stephen Taylor, Department of Basic Education, South Africa 

When it comes to education, unlike rugby, South Africa is often in the news for the wrong reasons. Far from being world champions, the country is one of the worst performers in international assessments of learning like TIMSS and PIRLS.  

However, South Africa has improved significantly in these assessments since the early 2000s. This year, McKinsey released a report identifying it as one of the “sustained and outsized improvers” in education. 

Moreover, the league table type of analysis which puts South Africa near the bottom is unfair because hardly any poorer countries participate in TIMSS and PIRLS. Within the Southern and Eastern African region, South Africa is a little above average, as the SEACMEQ assessments have been showing. 

The narrow focus on the absolute level of learning outcomes is also unfortunate because it means an important question is sometimes overlooked: Why did South Africa improve? 

The 2024 Spotlight report on South Africa, one of four country reports produced for the second cycle in the Spotlight series, highlights some of the reasons for the improvement and describes innovations the government is undertaking aimed at further improvement in the future.  

While it is virtually impossible to statistically attribute the improvements to specific factors, there are six system-wide reforms that researchers within and outside of the South African government have pointed to:  

  • Expansion of pro-poor policies, such as school feeding and no-fee schools. 
  • Rollout of a pre-school programme, known as Grade R. 
  • Better subject knowledge amongst new teachers. 
  • Annual National Assessments run in 2011–2014 which drew attention to learning outcomes in every primary school. 
  • Curriculum reforms culminating in the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS) in 2011. 
  • A National Workbook Programme, which transformed the availability and use of materials.

The South Africa country report explored developments related to the last two of these key improvement drivers: the curriculum and the workbook programme. 

In particular, the Spotlight report considers an innovation being piloted by the government, known as the Teaching Mathematics with Understanding (TMU) framework. This framework guides early grade mathematics teaching and learning and encourages teachers to create learner-centered classrooms to enable understanding, procedural fluency and mathematical reasoning among learners. The TMU pilot provided an enhanced version of the workbooks, referred to as Learner Activity Books. 

The focus of the second Spotlight cycle is on the alignment between the curriculum, the Learner Activity Books, teacher guides and assessments – wth each other and with the Global Proficiency Framework. The study found strong alignment between the national curriculum and the Global Proficiency Framework. There was some misalignment between the national curriculum and what is presented in learner books and assessments, but this arose mainly due to the adjustments that needed to be made to recover lost teaching time during the COVID-19 pandemic.  

The report went into details about how to improve the alignment across curriculum, materials and assessment, and also into how to improve the National Workbook Programme, which had the advantage of already being operational at full scale. 

The insight that alignment between pedagogical resources matters for learning is also an argument behind structured pedagogy programmes, which have gained support in recent years and have fared well in impact evaluations.  

Programmes implemented in South Africa, such as the Early Grade Reading Studies (EGRS) and the TMU pilot, have shown that providing good quality materials to both learners and teachers that are aligned with the curriculum is an effective way to improve learning outcomes in early grades.  

A different way of framing the point about alignment is to think explicitly about a theory of change for better curriculum implementation. Daily lesson plans that refer explicitly to well-aligned materials make it more likely that such materials are appropriately used. If teacher training has been provided on how to enact the curriculum, then lesson plans can prompt enactment of those instructional methods that were the focus of the training. 

The government-led Early Grade Reading Study further showed that on-site coaching visits, whereby someone is present to monitor and help improve classroom practice, create an even stronger theory of change. Across several interventions assessed through the EGRS, only a so-called triple cocktail of lesson plans, integrated materials and coaching has led to significant change in classroom practices and reading outcomes. 

This leaves us with a rather sobering understanding of how to generate improvements in learning outcomes at scale. Intensive professional support for teachers may be needed but, even then, the magnitude of improvement may be disappointingly small relative to the wide inequalities in learning that currently exist.

But rather than search for quick fixes, we should build on the lessons learned from South Africa’s previous system-wide improvement, and through the innovations described in the Spotlight report. 



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