 |
| ©The vast majority of ten-year-old children in South Africa cannot read for meaning. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks |
May 10 (GroundUp) - The National Reading Plan was supposed to help provincial education departments improve literacy between 2019/20 and 2023/24. In 2022, the education department's Director General told Parliament that all nine provinces had implemented the plan.
However, documents show that, except for the Western Cape, there has been no proper provincial planning or monitoring and evaluation. President Cyril Ramaphosa announced five fundamental goals for the government over the next ten years, including ensuring that "every ten-year-old will be able to read for meaning".
The Department of Basic Education (DBE) had not made publicly available the National Reading Plan, which was developed to "guide" provincial education departments on activities they should pursue to improve reading outcomes.
The most recent progress reports on the plan's implementation for the 2022/23 year show a disparity and a lack of coordination between the efforts of the nine provincial departments. The Reading Panel 2030 had previously pointed out that the Western Cape was the only province that budgeted for and implemented a province-wide reading programme. Professor Sarah Chapman, from the University of Cape Town’s Commerce Faculty, is an expert in monitoring and evaluation. She said the Reading Plan lacked a proper monitoring and evaluation framework, which would have included an implementation plan and an impact theory. The provinces’ reports were “chaotic” and included anything they had done – teacher training, press releases, attendance registers, and any partnership with an NGO.
Documentation included by the provinces as supposed evidence for their activities had not been collated into a monitoring and evaluation framework. The provinces’ reports rarely included measurements of progress towards the annual targets laid out in the plan. From a monitoring and evaluation perspective, one cannot say that the strategy was implemented successfully.
The Department of Education (DBE) responded to a request for comment on the criticisms of the plan by providing a writeup of what it considered some achievements towards the plan’s implementation. The DBE’s Taylor responded to the suggestion that the strategy and its implementation were “an abject failure” due to the timing of the plan, which was approved just before the pandemic set in.
He added that the department is working on a new revised version of the reading plan, which will succeed in bringing better coordination to the sector. GroundUp asked for comment from Mweli, his assistant and the department’s spokesperson, Elijah Mhlanga. Still, he did not respond to the conclusion that his claim in Parliament that all nine provinces implemented the reading plan was false.
