Teacher training under scrutiny as book traces South Africa’s literacy crisis to classroom preparation

South Africa’s persistent literacy and numeracy crisis may have roots in how foundation-phase teachers are selected, trained and prepared for the classroom, according to a new book examining three decades of teacher education research.

Initial teacher education is crucial to improving learning outcomes and tackling inequality, but the preparation of teachers who teach children in the first years of school remains a major concern.

The 2030 Reading Panel has described South Africa’s literacy crisis as severe, with data showing that about 70% of children in grades 1 to 3 cannot read at grade level in their home language. South Africa also ranked last among 57 countries that participated in the 2023 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls).

The book School Foundation, by education researchers Nick Taylor and Irene Pampallis, traces the roots of the country’s early-grade literacy and numeracy crisis to the way foundation and intermediate phase teachers are selected, trained and prepared for teaching.

Taylor, a former high school mathematics and science teacher and junior research fellow at JET Education Services, and Pampallis, a former high school mathematics teacher and PhD candidate whose research interests include initial teacher education, mathematics education, teacher geographical distribution and job satisfaction, draw on three decades of research, policy and regulatory work.

Pampallis said the book was deliberately written in an engaging and accessible way while providing a systematic account of the development of initial teacher education in South Africa.

“The book traces the development of teacher education over the last 30 years in terms of the relationship between past and present. It provides a systematic mapping of the field, and we can see where it has come from, where initial teacher education has come from, what is happening currently and what needs to be done to move it forward,” she said.

The book draws on published research, evaluation reports, conference proceedings, policy documents and official reports to provide a broad view of the field, though Pampallis acknowledged that the evidence base is uneven.

Its central focus is on improving the preparation of teachers who work in the first six years of schooling, with particular attention to foundational learning in mathematics, language and literacy.

I didn’t understand how teacher educators expected teachers to be able to teach reading if they weren’t giving them a comprehensive course on teaching reading.—  Nick Taylor, education researcher

Pampallis said these areas had been a longstanding concern for Taylor, who has argued for decades that strong foundational knowledge in literacy and numeracy is essential for all subsequent learning and, ultimately, for a high-performing education system.

She said the focus on initial teacher education was particularly timely after almost a decade of sustained research and policy attention on foundational learning.

“So what is the main argument? The book argues that initial teacher education, or ITE, is the most fertile ground for improving learning and interrupting the reproduction of inequalities that has for so long defined our system,” Pampallis said.

She said a temporary and cautious reduction in the number of teachers needing to be prepared could create an opportunity to reshape initial teacher education.

Both authors are more optimistic about the potential of ITE to improve the education system than some of the evidence might suggest.

They argue that better teacher preparation can influence not only teachers’ professional identities and classroom practice, but also the broader education system.

The book challenges the idea that teacher education institutions can operate in isolation, developing their own approaches to preparing teachers with little regard for what other institutions are doing or for the available research.

It argues that there is insufficient agreement within and between institutions about what constitutes a good teacher and how teachers should best be educated.

The authors call for competing pedagogical ideologies to be overcome through greater collaboration, research and the development of a stronger professional collegiate across the teacher education sector.

Taylor’s own experience with in-service teacher training contributed to his growing concern about the quality of initial teacher education.

Pampallis said JET Education Services received grants for several in-service training programmes that worked with scores of schools and hundreds of teachers. Evaluations were attached to the projects to assess their impact.

But Taylor said the programmes did not produce the desired results.

“You know, teachers have a poor initial teacher education. You can’t make up for that during in-service training. A couple of afternoon workshops here and there, a weekend here, maybe a whole week of training — you cannot make up for four years of full-time study in that situation,” he said.

His growing disillusionment with in-service training prompted him to look more closely at how teachers were initially prepared.

After stepping down from the leadership board at JET in 2010, Taylor said he began examining research into teacher education qualifications.

One study that particularly influenced him assessed teacher education qualifications across the country following the restructuring of the sector, when former teacher training colleges were closed, and universities assumed responsibility for teacher education.

The findings raised serious concerns about the quality of teacher preparation programmes.

Taylor said the evaluation concluded that more than half of the programmes were not fit for purpose, while the remainder were not substantially better.

This prompted him and his colleagues to investigate what was happening inside teacher education institutions.

One of the earliest projects examined foundation- and intermediate-phase curricula at five institutions representing different parts of the higher education landscape.

“I didn’t understand how teacher educators expected teachers to be able to teach reading if they weren’t giving them a comprehensive course on teaching reading,” he said.

The research subsequently influenced policy. Taylor said findings from the project were cited in the 2015 Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education Qualifications, which placed greater emphasis on discipline-specific curriculum knowledge.

The requirements also specified that primary school teachers should be able to teach language and mathematics, regardless of whether those subjects were their areas of specialisation.

For Taylor, this was a turning point in understanding the scale of the problem.

It also reinforced the argument at the heart of School Foundation, that South Africa cannot expect to improve literacy and numeracy outcomes without confronting the quality and content of the education received by the teachers responsible for laying those foundations.