Annelize Clark Hendry, Director of Programmes and HOD Professional Awards at Bellavista S.H.A.R.E, explains how, when South Africa invests heavily in proper teacher training at the start of the pipeline, the downstream benefits will be massive. We will eliminate the need for artificial progression, and high school naturally becomes much easier and infinitely more rewarding, for both students and teachers.
Walk into a typical South African Grade Three classroom on a sunny morning, and you are greeted by rows of bright eyed eight year olds with their whole lives ahead of them. But look closer at the open storybooks on their desks. For one out of every four children, the pages remain entirely silent. The ink doesn’t resolve into stories; it stays locked as meaningless shapes, cutting them off from the world of words before their futures even begin.
According to the Department of Basic Education’s Funda Uphumelele National Survey (FUNS), only 30% of learners in Grades One to Three are reading at grade level in their home language. Across the country, 15% of Grade Three children cannot read a single word. When the latest international and local assessments are synthesised, the reality is stark: only about 20% of our Grade Four learners can read for meaning. If a child cannot read by the end of Grade Three, the rest of the school curriculum becomes an insurmountable challenge.
Recent research by Ursula Hoadley and her colleagues (2025) at Stellenbosch University revealed a jarring paradox: while these early learning outcomes are devastatingly low, more than 60% of South African students still manage to complete high school. How? The study shows the system relies on lenient progression policies, highly predictable exam papers that reward rote “parrot fashion” memorisation, and school based assessments heavily cushioned by stressed educators. By the time these students reach high school, teachers face intense bureaucratic pressure to keep moving them along, resulting in classrooms where children are pushed ahead without knowing the basics. We then spend resources on emergency plans like matric camps and intense Grade 12 tutoring to boost the final pass rate. But trying to fix a broken foundation in the final hour only masks the crisis.
Where Do We Start: The Science of Reading
For decades, reading instruction was treated almost as a mystery, an organic skill children would simply “catch” if they were exposed to enough books. Today, the global consensus points decisively to the science of reading and structured literacy instruction in reception year and the foundation phase. We now know that reading is not a natural human milestone; the brain must be systematically rewired to read through explicit, systematic instruction of phonics (how letters map to sounds), phonemic awareness, vocabulary and oral reading fluency. Once these building blocks are well established, comprehension can naturally flourish. This cognitive science applies universally, regardless of the language of teaching and learning.
The FUNS data proved this link undeniably: 86% of children tracked as “non-readers” struggled significantly with written comprehension, while 66% of fluent readers sailed through it. Comprehension is the ultimate destination, but structured literacy instruction is the vehicle that gets them there.
The Path Forward: A Single, Coherent Strategy in Teacher Training
South Africa does not lack heart, nor does it lack dedicated educators. What our teachers lack is a system that explicitly equips them to teach reading as a science. Many primary school teachers report feeling completely stranded and unprepared to teach basic, structured literacy in any language. The solution? We need to shift our focus away from late-stage high school metrics and put our energy into equipping foundation phase educators with the precise pedagogical tools required to teach decoding, phonics, vocabulary and fluency.
The Bellavista S.H.A.R.E. initiative at Bellavista School harnesses the collective capacity we hold within our own staff, and of those thought leaders in the industry, to improve the quality of educational delivery in Southern Africa