Statement by André Gaum, Western Cape Education Minister

The Western Cape Education Department (WCED) launched a comprehensive Literacy Strategy today (Monday, 24 March 2003), to improve the reading, writing and reading comprehension skills of learners on all levels in the province.

Literacy is the cornerstone of learning. Without the ability to read, the learner is denied access to the world of learning; without the ability to write, the learner is denied full participation in that world.

Our mission in education is to ensure that our learners can lead fulfilling lives and contribute to the development of the province and the country.

Our learners must be able to read to achieve these objectives. Good reading comprehension skills are a prerequisite for all learning areas. Our learners must be fully literate to participate in the global knowledge economy.

As a society, we can also measure our success by the quality of life that reading brings to each individual.

In the Western Cape, we believe that our new Literacy Strategy will go a long way towards promoting and facilitating the development of these essential skills.

Unfortunately, a number of research projects conducted in the Western Cape over the past three years have shown that reading and literacy skills are poorly developed in earlier grades.

While Western Cape learners perform better than learners in other provinces do, research indicates that they read well below the level of learners in the same grades in other African countries.

While learners perform best on word recognition, they perform worst on sentence completion and sentence comprehension, reading comprehension and writing tasks.

Rural learners achieve scores well below their urban counterparts. A mismatch between home language and the language of learning and teaching also negatively affects reading skills.

The goal of our Literacy Strategy is to improve learner participation and success in literacy – to enable all learners to read and write at the appropriate level in their home and the language of teaching and learning, with appropriate levels of support.

Our strategy is built on three pillars:

• Teacher development – to improve skills in teaching reading and writing;
• Provision of resources and learning support materials (LSM); and
• Research and advocacy – to provide detailed data to inform the nature and location of required interventions and to engender support for the literacy strategy.

The WCED will adopt a multi-disciplinary approach to managing the implementation of the strategy.

The Senior Curriculum Planner: Literacy in the WCED’s Directorate: Curriculum Development will manage the strategy, assisted by the Provincial Literacy Coordinator.

The WCED will appoint a Literacy Task Team to monitor and advise the department. Disciplines represented on the team will include curriculum planning, language teaching, inclusive education, adult education and training, specialised education support, teacher training and book publishers and sellers. The team will also include teacher unions.

The Provincial Literacy Management Committee will be responsible for development planning and implementation, while an EMDC Literacy Management Committee at each Education Management and Development Centre will be responsible for implementation on a district level.

The WCED will also work with various agencies in partnership arrangements to foster effective literacy in our schools.

The Literacy Strategy includes outcomes, or objectives, for learners and teachers, for each learning phase, namely, the Foundation, Intermediate, Senior and Further Education and Training (FET) phases. These range from developing appropriate reading and writing skills in the Foundation Phase (Grades 1 to 3) to preparing learners for tertiary education in the FET phase (Grades 10 – 12).

The strategy outlines a comprehensive programme for each phase, taking into account requirements for teacher development, resources and learner support materials, and research and advocacy.

Key elements include using benchmarks provided by the National Curriculum Statement in training, advocacy and resource development using a variety of media. These resources include innovative printed materials, computer software and the internet.

The plan includes providing Classroom Book Kits of 100 or more books in primary schools and further development of the WCED’s Reading Schools campaign, to promote reading in schools on all levels and at home. The WCED’s Library Services will provide advice for parents.

Research will play a key role in policy development and for determining special interventions. Research will include testing Grades 3, 6 and 9, and studies of the provisioning of language studies in primary schools, the functioning of the current Reading Schools campaign and interventions by non-governmental organisations.

The campaign will pay special attention to rural schools with multigrade classes, disadvantaged schools and schools with multilingual classes.

The strategy will integrate a wide range of current and future special projects that are and will be contributing to developing literacy skills.

These include the WCED’s Multigrade Rural Schools Intervention, the new Cape Teaching Institute, our Classroom Book Kit project, our Reading Schools campaign and a new Multilingual Project, that will provide training on managing multilingual classes.

Others include a 150 Schools Literacy Intervention Project, targeting Grades 2 to 7 at 150 schools, and Grade 8 learners at schools participating in the Learning Schools Project, which achieved matric pass rates of less than 60%.

In addition, our Quality Learning Project is providing extensive support to language teachers in the FET band at 40 schools in our Metropole East district. The department will continue working closely with organisations such as READ and the Concentrated Language Encounter Programme (CLE), sponsored by Rotary.

The strategy provides a framework and a context for all of us to work together, as partners, to improve performance in literacy by all learners in the Western Cape. By working together, we can all break through to a better future, together.