Education

The Progress in International Reading and Literacy Study (PIRLS) is an international assessment of reading ability for Grade 4 learners, conducted every 5 years by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA).
International assessments like PIRLS help us to understand our learners’ performance relative to independently benchmarked international standards, and gain a better understanding of the areas in which we need to improve to give our children an internationally competitive education.
57 countries participated in PIRLS 2021, and the majority of the participating countries saw a decline in scores from 2016 to 2021. This was to be expected given the impact of Covid-19 on education systems and learning around the world.
South Africa’s results declined significantly, from 320 in 2016, to 288 in 2021, a drop of 32 points on the scale. South Africa achieved the lowest score out of all participants, and tied with Azerbajan for the largest decline in scores since 2016.
The Western Cape scored 363, 75 points ahead of the average score for South Africa, and 43 points ahead of the next-highest province, Gauteng.
South Africa was also a benchmarking participant through testing Grade 6 learners. The Western Cape scored 460, which is 76 points higher than South Africa as a whole, and 54 points higher than Gauteng.
Regardless of the relative performance within South Africa, we need to improve performance relative to the PIRLS centrepoint score of 500 and similar economies around the world.
This is why we are investing in developing our learners’ reading skills, especially in the Foundation Phase, to improve learning outcomes in the Western Cape.
Our #BackOnTrack programme includes extensive support for reading in the Foundation Phase, with every learner in Grades 1 to 3 having access to new decodable readers and anthologies at a cost of R115 million.
We have also provided training to 9 683 Foundation Phase teachers across three languages over the past two years, ensuring they are better equipped to teach reading in the vital early grades.
In 2022, we made the decision to allocate an extra two hours for reading each week within the school day in the Foundation Phase. This intervention has now been recommended to provinces across the country.
As part of the Basic Education Employment Initiative (BEEI), we will deploy Education Assistants as Reading Champions to Foundation Phase classes.
And we have additional resources supplied to our classrooms by our partners at Funda Wande, who are also providing training support to our teachers.
We are already seeing the impact of our support for reading in our systemic test results, particularly in the early grades where language scores now exceed those achieved in 2019.