JONATHAN JANSEN | Pirls of wisdom: poorest schools are again let down by government

Forget about learning losses from the pandemic, the education department has neglected its duty to plan and recoup

17 May 2023 - 23:31

There is no other way of saying this — the announcement by Progress in International Literacy Study (Pirls) 2021 on Tuesday has revealed that South African education is in an even worse crisis than we thought. In 2016, according to the same study, a staggering 78% of grade 4 pupils could not read for meaning. In 2021, wait for it, the situation got measurably worse and now 81% of the same grade year do not understand the words they are reading. In other words, a drop of 0.8 years of learning...