The Foundations for Learning Campaign, which we launched recently, is a call to schools and communities to focus on reading, writing and calculating.

The campaign will set out our expectations for teaching and learning in the foundation and intermediate phases. It will indicate and provide the resources needed for effective teaching. It will also spell out the testing required to check that learners are reaching the required standards from year to year.

Quality education is determined in the first years that a child spends at school. Maria Montessori was one of many educationists who believe that the foundations of human development are laid during the child's early years. She declared that: "The most important period of life is not the age of university studies, but the first one, the period from birth to the age of six."

This period is quality education's "golden hour", those years in which a child is taught the fundamental skills and competencies that will enable him or her to learn and to develop a clear conception of the world. The "golden hour" in education begins in the foundation phase, grades R to three and is consolidated in the intermediate phase in grades four to six. It is in this "golden hour" that children learn to read so that in the future they can read to learn.

They gain the skills necessary to understand the textbooks that they will need to read and to study in order to succeed in the matric exams and in their university studies. In the foundation phase children learn to express themselves, to put their thoughts on paper, to describe and later to explain the world around them. They begin to understand the concept and the power of numbers. The capacity to read, write and calculate well is the foundation of quality education.

While there is much to celebrate in post-1994 education, our scores in international assessments of reading and numeracy have been poor to alarming. The aim of these international rankings is to spur reform. Many countries have made the change required to improve learner performance through the introduction of national literacy strategies.

It is our turn now. It is our turn now to start where the impact will be the greatest, to focus our attention on the foundations for learning.

Already we have over 600 000 young children attending Grade R classes and we are committed to providing universal Grade R education by the year 2010. Our commitment is not only to having young learners in class, but our commitment is to ensuring that these youngsters receive quality Grade R education in which they develop their sense of self, their self confidence and their understanding of the world around them.

Importantly, Grade R teachers will teach them literacy and numeracy skills, so that they know how to engage with books, so that they know that stories come from the books we read and so that they understand the concept of numbers in the world around them.

They will hit the ground running when they arrive in Grade 1. So what is it that we must do in Grade 1 to take the excitement and interest in learning forward?

Non-negotiables

The Foundations for Learning Campaign will lay a solid foundation in languages and mathematics in the foundation and intermediate phases. The measure of that foundation will be that we will increase the average learner performance in languages and mathematics to no less than 50% in the four years of the campaign. In 2011, we will conduct a national evaluation, which will assess the languages and mathematics abilities of learners in South Africa.

In order to succeed, the campaign will require the following:

• That every classroom has the appropriate resources for effective teaching. A list of basic resources is contained in the government gazette on this campaign, published on 14 March 2008. Each school must ensure that every teacher has at least the basic minimum resources in the classroom.
• That teachers plan and teach effectively. All teachers are expected to be in their classes teaching planned lessons during contact teaching time. The timetable must require that every learner in the primary school engages in reading at school for 30 minutes every day, writes a piece of extended writing appropriate to the grade, and engages in mental maths for 10 minutes and written maths for 20 minutes every day.
• That district teacher forums are established in all districts. Teachers are expected to be a member of the district forum, or of a school forum, so that ideas, experience and best practice are shared and teachers can enhance their teaching strategies.
• That teachers assess learner performance regularly. Standardised assessments will be provided by the Department of Education and the results of these assessments must be reported to the district office from where the results for each school will be sent, via the provincial office, to my office. To assist teachers to manage the assessment tasks within the continuous assessment framework, my department will provide milestones for expected attainment in mathematics and languages per term per grade. Annual tests based on the quarterly assessments will be provided to all schools.

Those are the "non-negotiables" of the Foundations for Learning Campaign.

The McKinsey report on top performing education systems in the world shows that the best systems focus on three important things: they get the best teachers (they take the top third of graduates); they get the best out of teachers; and they step in when pupils start to lag behind.

We are asking every principal to step in to prevent pupils from lagging behind. The core purpose of principalship is to provide leadership and management in all areas of the school. As leaders, principals set the targets for their schools and design strategic plans in which they motivate and inspire their teachers and learners to attain these targets. As managers, they make sure that the targets are achieved.

We expect every principal of a public school to prepare a plan setting out how academic performance at the school level will be improved. It is the responsibility of each and every principal to manage and support teachers in their effort to improve the ability of learners to read, write, count and calculate at the appropriate level.

The success of the plan will be measured in the performance of the learners in the end of the year standardised assessment. District officials will co-ordinate the collection and collation of data from the quarterly tests for reporting to the province.

Role of parents

The responsibility to teach our children to read, write and calculate is not the teacher's responsibility alone. That responsibility is shared with parents as well. Parents' obligations do not end with the payment of school fees, or taxi fares to get their child to a school that offers quality education. It is their responsibility to ensure that their children do their homework, and that their children read with them or to them every day.

Not only will parents be giving their child the best possible grounding in life, but they will also build a bond with their child that can never be broken and that in itself is important in a world where parents and children so easily drift apart.

Our call goes well beyond the small circle of a school community. We appeal to public figures, to unions, to businesses big and small, to institutions of higher education, to non-profit organisations, to join hands with your local school community and assist them in whatever way you can to reach the goals of universal competency in reading, writing and calculating.

We know what we wish to achieve in our education system. In the foundation phase learners must learn how to read, write, count and calculate confidently and with understanding.

In the intermediate phase, learners must extend their competency in reading, writing and calculating. They must have learnt to read so that they can read to learn. When learners reach high school, they must be able to work with their teachers in class but also be able to continue their studies outside of the classroom because they have learnt to be independent learners.

In this campaign, we appeal to the South African community to join in a determined effort to ensure that teachers teach, principals manage, learners learn, and parents support the education of their children.

Working together, we can ensure that every learner will have the opportunity for a better life in the future. From the child in Cape Town to the child in Limpopo, reading, writing, counting and calculating will take them to the forefront of development in the 21st century.