A Stellenbosch education institute has celebrated a potential breakthrough in addressing the country’s literacy and numeracy crisis, with children from a local township achieving exceptional literacy scores, significantly outperforming the national average.
In a recent survey conducted in Khayamandi, where the Community-Rooted Education (CoRE) training programme was launched by the Indaba Institute a few years ago, children aged 4 and 5 (taught by CoRE-trained teachers) recorded 94% scored for Emergent Literacy and Language, against an average of 71% in the Western Cape and 54,7% nationally. A 20 to 40% positive deviation is statistically very significant, given the Khayamandi sampling is from quintile 1 and 2 learners.
In Emergent Numeracy and Mathematics, the children who have benefited from Indaba-trained teachers scored 57%, compared to 47% in the Western Cape and 33,9% nationally.
The 2021 Thrive by Five Index, released in April 2022, is the largest survey of preschool child development ever undertaken in SA. The index highlighted, among other metrics, that a staggering 57% of children enrolled in ELPs in SA fail to thrive by age 5.
But the results of the Indaba Institute, in Stellenbosch, has now recorded a rare glimmer of hope.
André Shearer, Indaba founder and chairperson, said the institute delivers CoRE, which trains teachers in the heart of their own communities. Instead of a “top-down” lecturing approach, the CoRE programme trains and empowers teachers to dramatically improve the education they offer to young children in their care at ECD centres. He said: “These promising and impressive outcomes reflect the positive impact of CoRE, as teachers have clearly been empowered to enhance their children’s abilities in the two key metrics driving the devastating academic outcomes in SA’s education system – numeracy and literacy.”
The survey was conducted by Data Drive 2030, which used the Early Learning Outcome Measures (ELOMs) 4-5 assessment tool, and compared against benchmarks taken from the Thrive by Five 2021 Index.
The index found that 50% of children face barriers to thriving that limit their chances of realising their full potential, reported Innovation Edge. Only 43% of these will start their formal education with the right foundations in place.
By comparison, Indaba describes its ability to enhance children’s life chances by training teachers in innovative teaching methods and to harness local language, culture, resources and creativity.
In this manner, teachers mobilise their own communities to cherish and rally behind quality ECD education collectively, even for poverty-stricken children.
In July Siviwe Gwarube, basic education minister, said the department’s most crucial priorities are to intensify efforts to improve access to and quality of early-childhood development and improve literacy and numeracy skills across all schooling phases.
“Indaba has demonstrated how this can be achieved with the CoRE programme,’’ added Shearer. “The implications of the results we’ve managed to achieve in the ELOMs are nothing short of a revelation.
“Since we started the Indaba Institute we’ve realised we have to find a way that contributes to the dramatic transformation of society. If you look at the literacy and numeracy crisis in SA, it is unprecedented and unbelievably complicated, and it threatens the future of the well-being of SA, unless we get it right.
“The ELOMs, related to the CoRE programme in Khayamandi, in one of the hardest-hit townships in the country, found within the context of some of the greatest Gini Coefficients in the world, have yielded a literacy and numeracy outcome significantly higher than the benchmarks.”
The recent assessment produced key findings that will inform their strategy and action plans to highlight areas needing further intervention and improvement, particularly in fine and gross motor skills.
Indaba believes this is a systemic issue in the vulnerable, poverty-stricken communities it serves, where many ECD centres lack safe outdoor play and recreation spaces.
Understanding these challenges immediately enables the CoRE facilitator to focus on equipping practitioners with the tools and strategies to better support children’s development in these areas. The ELOM is a set of population-based child assessment tools designed to determine whether children are developmentally on track for their age. The tools also establish whether an ECD programme is effective in preparing children for entry into school, and identify areas for programmatic improvement.
The CoRE programme has proven that, with the right approach, even in the most impoverished communities, we can achieve remarkable improvements in literacy and numeracy.
“At Indaba, we remain committed to this vision of a transformed education system, where every child, regardless of their background, has access to the quality education they deserve. These results show that change is not only possible, it is already happening.”
