Staff Reporter

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, collaborations that drive positive change and shape the future of education have never been more important. For over a decade, Oxford University Press (OUP) and the Mandela Rhodes Foundation (MRF) formed an innovative shareholding partnership, pledging to promote leadership and scholarship in Africa to benefit present and future generations, igniting a shared passion for knowledge, empowerment and the pursuit of excellence.

Since its inception in 2008, the alliance between Oxford University Press and Mandela Rhodes Foundation has flourished, creating a powerful synergy that transcends borders and impacts lives.

At the heart of Oxford University Press’s mission lies the commitment to the dissemination of knowledge and the advancement of education. We believe education is a fundamental catalyst for progress, enabling individuals to transform their lives and contribute meaningfully to society. The partnership with the Mandela Rhodes Foundation perfectly aligns with this vision, as Mandela Rhodes Foundation shares a similar dedication to nurturing young African leaders through education and empowerment. “It is a privilege and honour for Oxford University Press to travel on this journey with the MRF as a like-minded partner who believes in the transformative power of education and who has such a profound impact on the shaping of leadership in Africa”, said Henri Pieterse, Managing Director of Oxford University Press Southern Africa.

On 14th July, The Mandela Rhodes Foundation (MRF) hosted its 20th-anniversary celebration, which took place at the Century City Conference Centre in Cape Town. This milestone also coincided with the 10th anniversary of the death of former president Nelson Mandela, the founding patron of the foundation. The book titled “The Audacious Experiment: The Mandela Rhodes Story” was co-authored by Shaun Johnson, the late founding CEO of the MRF and Professor Elleke Boehmer. She was supported by research assistants Iris Nxumalo-de Smidt and Makomborero Muzenda, who are Mandela Rhodes Scholars.

Mandela Rhodes Foundation CEO, Judy Sikuza, introduced the panellists. The discussions were around the theme: “The courage to be unpopular: lessons on leading in complex times” to bring Nelson Mandela’s leadership legacy to life in the present moment. Hanri congratulated the editorial team of Oxford University Press, who generously published the book. Furthermore, Hanri said she was reminded by a quote by Katherine Paterson, “A dream without action is just a wish, but a dream backed by passion becomes a purpose”, a common theme evident in the book of the purpose of delivering Mandela’s promise.

Mandela Rhodes Scholars Iris Nxumalo-de Smidt and Makomborero Muzenda encouraged young readers to purchase the book as it highlights the power of community and collaboration and that the MRF story demonstrates how individual ideas have the power to transform the world and the ability to make an impact. Furthermore, through the stories of scholarship recipients, the book provides a global perspective and promotes cross-cultural understanding. It encourages young readers to embrace diversity and appreciate different perspectives in an increasingly interconnected world.

The Mandela Rhodes Foundation’s was founded in 2003 in partnership with the Rhodes Trust. To date, they have selected 622 Mandela Rhodes scholars from 33 African countries by offering young leaders from across the African continent a chance to become part of Nelson Mandela’s legacy of transformative impact. Oxford University Press has had the privilege of contributing to the vital work of The Mandela Rhodes Foundation by reinvesting 25% of our profits in education, research and scholarship.

The partnership between Oxford University Press and the Mandela Rhodes Foundation holds immense significance for several reasons. Firstly, it amplifies the reach and impact of both organisations, allowing us to extend our educational resources and support to a broader audience. By working together, we leverage our collective strengths to develop innovative solutions that address the challenges faced by African communities. Secondly, this collaboration serves as a beacon of hope, inspiring generations of young Africans to pursue their educational aspirations and take up leadership roles in their respective fields. By nurturing a diverse and inclusive community of scholars, we empower them to drive positive change and transform their societies from within.

As we celebrate over a decade of collaboration, the partnership between Oxford University Press and the Mandela Rhodes Foundation stands as a testament to the power of collective action, shared vision and the pursuit of excellence. Together, we continue to pave the way for a brighter, more inclusive future, where education and ethical leadership thrive.

INSIDE EDUCATION

DESMOND THOMPSON

When the news broke in May that South Africa had come last in a global assessment of reading achievement, it caused a nationwide outcry. This special report examines the findings, speaks to experts to make sense of it all, and looks at the prospects of improvements.

Our “child literacy rates are a disgrace,” Business Day said in an editorial the day after the findings of the latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls) were released on 16 May 2023, showing that four out of every five Grade 4s tested in South Africa (SA) in 2021 could not “read for meaning”.

This level of reading is the highest “be- cause it requires that our children are empowered to analyse and interpret information and make deductions and inferences, which demonstrate their ability to organise and internalise facts logically, systematically and coherently,” Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga explained to parliament in her department’s budget vote two days later.

17 OECD 2016- Portrait of the TJA Fellow Nic Spaull at OECD.
OECD, Paris, France
Photo: OECD/Michael Dean

That only 19% of Grade 4s had shown they could do these things was described as a “generational catastrophe” by Nic Spaull, associate professor in Economics and research fellow with the Research on Socioeconomic Policy (Resep) group at Stellenbosch University (SU). His sentiment would be echoed in numerous news reports and op-eds over the next few days and weeks.

Last year, Mathanzima Mweli, director-general of the Department of Basic Education (DBE), wrote that learners “who do not acquire the foundational skills necessary for proficient reading remain perpetually behind, as their ability to process, interpret and understand grade-level texts is largely impeded.”

Reading-for-meaning tests are conducted in Grade 4 because it is considered an important transition point in children’s development, when they are supposed to go from “learning to read” to “reading to learn”, according to the Pirls website.

What is Pirls?

Pirls is a “regular international comparative assessment of student achievement in reading,” an initiative of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, headquartered in Amsterdam.

Since 2001, Pirls has been conducted every five years by the International Study Centre of Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development. In SA, Pirls is undertaken by the Centre for Evaluation and Assessment of the University of Pretoria’s Faculty of Education.

SA has been participating in Pirls since 2006 and was one of 57 countries which took part in 2021. It was the only sub-Saharan African country in the study; the other participants from the continent were Egypt and Morocco. The relatively few other developing countries included Jordan and Brazil. A total of 12 426 of our Grade-4 learners in 321 schools were assessed, representing all our official languages (11 at that stage) and all nine provinces.

How did we do?

• SA’s score dropped from 78% of Grade 4s not being able to read for meaning in 2016 to 81% in 2021. This is scarcely better than our 82% in 2011, which means the country has lost an entire decade of progress.

• Learners writing in Afrikaans and English maintained their performance, while the performance of those writing in SA’s other official languages worsened.

• Results in all provinces deteriorated, but the Western Cape, Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal performed better than the national average.

The impact of Covid-19

Motshekga blamed the weakening of SA’s results on the “devastating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on teaching and learning.”

Nompumelelo Mohohlwane

In an op-ed in Daily Maverick, Nompumelelo Mohohlwane, the DBE’s deputy director for research, monitoring and evaluation, concurred: “The decline is extremely unfortunate, but it was not sur- prising because school closure was one of the early responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. In SA, this led to the loss of about 60% of the academic year in 2020 and 50% in 2021.”

Inequality

As to why the performance of Grade-4 learners who wrote the tests in African languages was worse than the results of those who wrote in Afrikaans and English, Motshekga blamed “our regrettable past”.

This was a reference to the stratification of education under apartheid in terms of class and race.

Prof Servaas van der Berg

In an interview with Inside Education, Prof Servaas van der Berg, who holds the SA National Research Chair in the Economics of Social Policy, based at SU, confirmed that there was a close correlation between the socio-economic status of schools and their feeder communities, on the one hand, and the academic performance of their learners, on the other.

“Better performing learners and schools tend to come from wealthier communities. There are exceptions, but unfortunately, we do not have enough examples of good performance, in general, coming from poorer communities and schools. It seems to be a question of resources, at least partly,” he said.

He ascribed that the Western Cape and Gauteng showed the most minor decline in Pirls to the fact that “they are, in the first instance, our wealthier provinces.”

The DBE looks at the levels of income, literacy and unemployment in a community to determine a school’s ranking. Quintile-1 to -3 schools are no-fee paying schools, and quintile-4 and five schools may charge fees.

According to Van der Berg, nearly two-thirds of Western Cape learners are in quintile-4 and -5 schools. They tend to have better facilities, and their learners also tend to have greater access to books, computers and the internet at home – resources that are in short supply in poorer schools and communities.

Language

The Pirls results also reflect South Africa’s complexities in terms of language.

“About 70% of learners in South Africa are in no-fee schools that use an African language as the language of instruction for the first three grades. During this time, most children learn English as a subject and then experience a switch in Grade 4 when English becomes the language of instruction. Their African languages become a subject,” Mohohlwane wrote.

“In contrast, about 9% of learners start school in Afrikaans and do not switch at any stage but continue with Afrikaans after Grade 4 until matric. Similarly, the 23% that start in English continue past Grade 4 without any language switching.”

However, she argued, it “would be a mistake to blame the African languages for the decline,” adding that “it remains the right decision to start school in the language you know best.”

Spaull agrees that “the legacy of colonialism and apartheid is very much still with us” but argues, “That doesn’t mean there is not more that we could do to redress that legacy – we have proven interventions about what works to improve reading in no-fee schools, but we are not doing them.”

What can be done?

In a synthesis report released in 2022, the DBE says foundation-level reading has been high on its agenda since at least 2012.

By 2019, this emphasis had found its way into President Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address, when he said that “substantially improving reading comprehension in the first years of school” had become a “critical priority”.

The master plan to give effect to this goal was supposed to be the National Reading Strategy, also launched that year. However, it suffered from some fundamental flaws, which – according to Spaull – included having “no credible milestones and no credible plan of achieving it.”

Then Covid-19 struck, and school closures and rotational timetables wrought their damage, as reflected by the 2021 Pirls findings.

Now, an improved plan is in the pipeline – the National Integrated Reading Literacy.

The strategy mentioned by Motshekga in the DBE’s budget vote. She said there had been “lessons learnt”, one of which seems to be prioritisation. The plan’s “10 pillars” of old will be reduced to “four key interdependent strands”.

Inside Education got more details from Mohohlwane on what the new plan due to be launched might contain:

• Policy: There will be an emphasis on home language literacy in the foundation phase.

• Teachers: In-depth training and support through such mechanisms as ex- pert reading coaches, workshops, and daily lesson plans.

• Materials: Such ideas as graded readers, flashcards, posters, big books, and alphabet friezes are integrated into lesson plans to ensure they are used appropriately within a coherent lesson.

• Parents and communities: Advocacy about the importance of fostering reading enjoyment among children.

Triple cocktail

In its synthesis report, the DBE said it had found that a “triple cocktail” of daily lesson plans, quality integrated reading materials and on-site coaching resulted in an extra 40% of learning at the end of one year.

These ideas were derived from a series of large-scale evaluations since 2015 in North West and Limpopo to build a scientific evidence base about what interventions have the most significant impact on reading outcomes and how the change process works.

Incubating ideas

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs), such as Funda Wande, are also helping to look for solutions.

Dr Nwabisa Makaluza

“We incubate ideas that we think would work. At the moment, we are trying different models in three provinces,” Dr Nwabisa Makaluza, head of research and development, told Inside Education.

“In the Eastern Cape, we are trialling coaching, both by outside experts and by equipping schools’ heads of departments to become coaches.

“In Limpopo, our teaching assistant model was very effective, and we also got good results from providing schools with learning and teaching support materials.

“And our latest project is in the Western Cape, where the provincial education department is doing the rollout themselves in about 50 schools. Elements include reading coaches, monitoring and evaluation.”

Collaboration

Makaluza says public-private partnerships are essential.

“We are under no illusion that we can do this alone. We do not even start at a school without building a relationship with the relevant education department because they are the schools’ custodians.

“And when we get the results of our trials, we always feed it back to the departments – so they can learn with us. Collaboration is essential.”

Benchmarking

Dr Zelda Barends

Dr Zelda Barends, a senior lecturer in curriculum studies at SU’s Faculty of Education, is part of the DBE’s benchmarking process for learning to read in the foundation phase. The benchmarks were developed through collaboration between education technocrats, reading experts, linguists and quantitative experts.

Grade-specific reading benchmarks pro- vide the tools to measure whether learners are on-track to reading for meaning by the end of the foundation phase. The benchmarks for each language differ, but they all include the following:

• By the end of Grade 1, all learners should be able to sound a certain number of letters per minute correctly.

• By the end of Grade 2, all learners should be able to read a certain number of words within a passage correctly.

• This tally would go up for Grade 3.

The benchmarks are set high enough to support system-wide improvements yet not so high as to be unattainable. Learners achieving the required fluency are increasingly able to comprehend what they are reading and would therefore be able to transition to the next stage, the intermediate phase.

The benchmarks are intended for use by teachers, school leaders and provinces, as well as the national department, to support reading in South Africa’s official languages.

Principals

Barends says the role of principals is something that is often overlooked.

“If we start investing in school leadership, we would be able to turn the problem of reading around slowly but surely, because when there’s a visionary leader, someone who believes in what they’re doing and knows how to work with other people and get the most out of them, things change for the better.”

Teachers

Some commentators say some teachers are part of the problem – those who are not motivated, for whatever reason, and don’t give their best.

However, Barends said, “Teachers need some grace in the system.”

“Most of them are working very hard, but they are getting flak from all sides. They are expected to achieve high outcomes with all the learners that come to them, but the learners are at different levels, and sometimes the teachers have not had the specialised training they need to teach learners to read.”

That is why teacher empowerment is considered vital by the DBE.

In its 2022 synthesis report, the Department said that teacher support interventions had positive impacts on reading outcomes, mainly on-site coaching.

Mohohlwane said that teachers some- times resisted interventions they experienced as critical of their abilities but that it was possible to overcome this problem.

“In our coaching interventions, we have coined the term ‘critical friend’ because they visit often, build up a relationship with the same teacher, and most importantly, only with them. They don’t report to the principal or anyone else in the system. It’s not linked to a teacher’s performance review or promotion or anything like that.

They are just an expert resource to help the teacher teach children to read. It may take teachers three or six months to relax with this per- son, but then they say they feel supported.”

Accountability

Some analysts have identified a lack of accountability by teachers and principals, and schools – especially at the foundation phase level – as a significant part of the problem.

“In a democracy, the role of civil society is to hold the government to account for what it says it is doing and what its constitutional obligations are,” Spaull told Inside Education.

He thinks the fact that the Pirls results have caused an outcry is putting pressure on the DBE, which might result in quicker results.

Pace of change

The Parliamentary Monitoring Group reported that when Motshekga briefed parliament about Pirls on 23 May, she said, “Education was like growing a tree, not like carrots”, – meaning that it takes time to get results.

Her statement might be accurate but is unlikely to satisfy South Africans who want urgent action to avoid losing another generation.

Before the Covid-19 shock, SA was making good progress in improving early-grade reading scores. Between the 2011 and 2016 Pirls cycles, SA showed the second-fastest improvement among all participating countries, after Morocco.

The question is now whether we can return to that pace and even speed things up.

Mohohlwane is optimistic: “The planning and testing and policy formulation and lobbying have been ten years in the making, and now things are coming together.

If it were not for Covid, we would have been further along. Now we must redouble our efforts to make progress. We will get there incrementally.”

Special time

Makaluza agrees: “I find the current push from the public, academia, the media, the rest of civil society and even from within government and the education departments, national and provincial, interesting. It’s a special time of consensus that we need a drastic change, which might give us the push we need.”

* Thompson is a freelance journalist.

INSIDE EDUCATION

Dineo Bendile

Media mogul Oprah Winfrey is on a mission to influence the South African education system into adopting a trauma-informed approach in its curriculum.

Last week Winfrey, through her school the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls (OWLAG), hosted a gathering of teachers and counselors in Midrand to discuss the impact of trauma on learning and strategies to support children.

The proposed strategies are based on the Neurosequential Model (NM) in Education, which has been in use at Winfrey’s institution since 2018 to address the needs of the learners, who come from disadvantaged and often traumatic backgrounds.

In an interview with Inside Education at the Gallagher Convention Centre, Winfrey dismissed any plans of opening another school in South Africa, and said her future efforts would be focused on seeing the rollout of the Neurosequential Model (NM) in as many local schools as possible.

“The work continues but no more brick and mortar for me,” Winfrey laughed. “The great hope is that, beginning with this conference, the word gets spread and we get more educators who are interested and have their own ‘Aha’ moment here.

“We are doing it [trauma-informed work], we are successful with it and we see the difference between the classes that have had it and the ones who didn’t. And we’re hoping that people will take this message, come to us for training and then spread the word,” Winfrey said.

At its inception in 2007 OWLAG, with its state-of-the-art facilities, was not a trauma-informed school. Consequently Winfrey, who had handpicked all the learners at the school, began worrying when the girls started to exhibit mental health problems.

Panic attacks, behavioral issues and disassociation, which can mimic chronic daydreaming, became common scenes inside OWLAG classrooms.

“I understood after so many girls being anxious and so many girls being depressed that we were doing something wrong. And there was something we needed to do that I wasn’t aware of. When we started, I just thought we just needed to build a good school,” Winfrey said.

“And then I realised that because these girls were so specifically from backgrounds that are challenged…unless you address that, you’re going to have major issues going forward,” she added.

Following this realisation she enlisted the services of neurosurgeon Dr Bruce Perry who explained that heightened anxiety, reduced concentration, and impaired problem-solving skills were among the many symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the learners due to their backgrounds and abrupt change in environment.

Perry proposed the introduction of the Neurosequential Model (NM) at the school, which encourages healing the parts of the brain that have been impaired by trauma, in order to return children to a calm state under which they can learn.

Some of the trauma-informed techniques used at OWLAG under this model include self-regulating activities such as going for walks, breathing exercises, music, meditation and other activities.

“The thing that disturbed me was that we’d gotten to the end of the six-year term and so many girls were still feeling this sense of unworthiness,” Winfrey recalled. “They didn’t even understand why they were there. NM helps you understand why you’re there. That what happened to you or your circumstances does not make you lesser than”.

The Covid-19 pandemic imposed great challenges on learners globally, as schools shut their doors during the lockdowns calling for the adoption of virtual lessons.

For many children, learning from home meant they did not have the comforts of the school environment to shield them from the difficulties in their homes and communities.

Winfrey said this was initially a concern for the staff at OWLAG, as many of the girls would have to leave their palatial boarding-school to return to their challenged environments for an indefinite period. However, their academic performance exceeded what teachers at OWLAG had expected, something Winfrey credits to the school’s trauma-informed approach, which could aptly anticipate learners’ needs.

During that period social workers were sent to the homes of every learner to monitor their wellbeing. Power-packs and Wifi routers were provided and staff members were available to attend to any technological challenges learners had.

While the hope is for the trauma-informed models to be adopted in other South African schools, the country’s public schooling system is burdened with systemic and infrastructural issues which threaten the ability to adequately address children’s trauma.

In addition to trauma in the community, many South African children experience trauma in their schools where pit latrines threaten their sense of safety and, in some cases, result in death.

Earlier this year the KwaZulu-Natal Education Department came under fire for irregularly awarding a feeding scheme tender to a service provider that failed to deliver food, leaving thousands of children without a meal that in many cases could have been their only one for the day. These are some of the examples of the plight facing South African children, which will require an overhaul of the whole system to address.

Educators present at the OWLAG conference in Midrand lamented fractures in the system which made it difficult for them to recommend or access psychological or social work services for children who showed signs of needing assistance.

This was one of the many challenges highlighted as a hindrance in the adoption of trauma-informed approaches in schools, which would require all necessary professionals to be on board.

From an educator’s perspective, the Neurosequential Model (NM) would also require teachers to undergo processes to heal their own trauma to avoid the use of punitive measures when dealing with wounded children.

OWLAG Executive Director Gugu Ndebele said the mission was to have this training become part of the curriculum at teacher training institutions.

“We are paying it forward by aligning with the schools nearby. And once the teachers in those schools get it, we don’t need [to influence] the system, the teachers will change things,” Ndebele said.

“Our biggest wish is for the [trauma-informed] work we are doing to be the core curriculum for teacher education. That’s why we have universities here. We want to see how we make it the core curriculum, so that every teacher that goes through the system understands”.

Speaking on behalf of the Gauteng Education Department, Head of Department Edward Mosuwe said his department had noticed worrying trends in Gauteng schools.

This year, Gauteng’s 24-hour hotline had received more than 50 complaints of bullying at school, nearly 30 complaints of physical bullying and more than 200 phone calls from learners complaining about abuse.

For these and other reasons, Mosuwe said the Gauteng Education Department would commit itself to implementing the OWLAG model of trauma-informed education in public schools.

“We want to work with the OWLAG team. I have been to the OWLAG school and I’ve seen what they do. How I wish all our schools could take these principles of trauma-informed schools as a phenomenon that begins to define the new South African school,” Mosuwe said.

Winfrey is no stranger to trauma herself. As a young girl growing up in rural Mississippi, Winfrey experienced multiple incidents of trauma, including sexual assault by a family member from the time she was seven-years-old all the way into her teenage years.

While there was no knowledge of the Neurosequential Model (NM) in her environment at that time, it was her school that afforded her the safety she needed in the world.

In particular, Winfrey said it was her Grade 4 teacher, Mrs Mary Duncan, who changed her trajectory. “Oh I will tell you what Mrs Duncan did…she saw me,” Winfrey recalled emotionally. “She saw that I was smart, she saw that I loved learning. She encouraged me and told me that I was pretty. She told me that I can be anything I wanted to be.

“And so school was my haven, it was the only place where I actually felt safe. That’s why I loved school and I hated when summer [holidays] came,” she added.

According to Winfrey teachers were one of the most important components of helping schools become trauma-informed institutions. She said it would be important for South African teachers to receive healing from their own emotional scars first so that they could become a safe haven for wounded children, the way Mrs Duncan was for her.

“It is so incumbent upon the teachers to see themselves, getting them to heal. Because if you’ve been through apartheid, you’ve been through war, you’ve been through trauma and there is just no way around it. [For both] black and white,” Winfrey said.

“So we [have to] work on ourselves first. You have to heal in order to share that healing with other people, and then you offer that healing in the most generous of spirits to others”.

INSIDE EDUCATION