SA Comes Bottom of the Class in Literacy

Leading education experts cannot explain how South Africa’s education system is less successful than those of many developing countries, despite well-crafted policies and enviable resources.

Earlier this month, SA’s representatives joined 300 other delegates at a World Literacy Summit in the United Kingdom where they signed the ‘Oxford Declaration’ that seeks a recommitment to education going beyond the United Nations Millennium Development goal of universal access to schooling by 2015.

The CEO of the Molteno Institute for Language and Literacy, Masennya Dikotla, who attended the summit, says the global focus should be on pupil performance and how educational resources, the abilities of teachers, and matters such as home-language tuition contribute to pupil performance.

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