At the time of transition to democracy, fundamental reforms to the administration, governance
and funding of education were immediately necessary. A unified national department of
education was established while considerable responsibility was vested at the provincial level.
Curriculum reform, although ultimately not uncontroversial, represented a strong break from
previous arrangements and sought to advance critical thinking and problem solving. Public
spending on education has gone from being highly unequal on the basis of race under apartheid to
being well targeted towards poor children. Despite these mainly positive trends, a far more
resilient legacy from the past has been the low quality of education within the historically
disadvantaged parts of the school system. This seriously constrains the ability of the education
system to provide a pathway out of poverty for poor children.
A cross-country comparison of educational attainment reveals a peculiar pattern specific to South
Africa. The rate of attainment of levels of education up until about 11 years is high in South
Africa relative to other middle-income countries. Beyond 12 years of education, however, South
Africa?s attainment rate is amongst the lowest of these countries. As far as access to education is
concerned, it would therefore appear that South Africa is doing well throughout most of the
primary and secondary phases and poorly thereafter. However, it is important to understand that
high rates of grade progression despite a generally low quality of schooling in the primary and
early secondary phases leads to substantial drop-out prior to the standardised matric examination,
failure to pass matric and failure to achieve a university endorsement – all reasons for
discontinuing education. A closer analysis of access to education in South Africa thus points to a
deeper problem of quality.
In the recently conducted SACMEQ1
III (2007) survey of Grade 6 mathematics and reading,
South Africa performed below most African countries that participated in the study. An
alarmingly high proportion of Grade 6 learners have clearly not mastered even the most basic
reading and numeracy skills. Using a categorisation of competency levels provided by SACMEQ
as a benchmark, learners who have not reached Level 3 in the reading and mathematics tests can
be regarded as functionally illiterate and functionally innumerate in the sense that they have not
acquired the basic reading and numeracy skills necessary to function meaningfully in society
(Shabalala, 2005: 222). Of the 15 education systems that participated in the study, South Africa
has the third highest proportion of functionally illiterate learners (27%), and the fifth highest
proportion of functionally innumerate learners (40%). Figure 1 shows the proportions of
functionally illiterate grade 6 learners within each SACMEQ country.