Proactive Interventions to Build Stronger Learning Foundations

6Make sure every child is ready to read by the time they go to school

HANDS-ON Experience Learning

Building Stronger Learning Foundations

PROACTIVE INTERVENTIONS TO BUILD STRONGER LEARNING FOUNDATIONS

One of South Africa’s biggest developmental challenges is the large proportion of children who cannot read for meaning in early grades1. Reading with comprehension is a fundamental skill upon which others are built. Children who do not have strong learning foundations are not equipped to read for meaning and, without adequate support, they struggle to reach their potential with long-term social- and economic consequences for the country. We can’t rely on schools alone to fix the country’s literacy problem as causal factors occur before children enter primary school.

It is well known that South Africa has a literacy crisis, with most Grade 4 children unable to read for meaning in any language2 Fortunately, the government has started to make reading a key developmental priority. President Cyril Ramaphosa often cites reading for meaning in his State of the Nation Address (SONA), envisaging that in the next 10 years “every 10-year-old will be able to read for meaning”3. As part of the government’s efforts to improve literacy levels and education outcomes in the public schooling system, the Department of Basic Education

(DBE) initiated the Early Grade Reading Study (EGRS) to better understand the literacy challenge and find ways of addressing it in collaboration with academics from the University of the Witwatersrand, Georgetown University and the Human Sciences Research Council4

These studies are generating evidence around what sort of interventions influence reading outcomes in the primary school years.

1 78% of South African Grade 4 children cannot read for meaning in any language. Source: https://nicspaull.com/2017/12/05/the-unfolding-reading-crisis-thenew-pirls-2016-results/

2 https://nicspaull.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/p16-pirls-internationalresults-in-reading.pdf

3 https://resep.sun.ac.za/reading-for-meaning-a-common-issue-inpresidents-sona-speech-and-reseps-binding-constraints-report/sample-post/

4 https://www.education.gov.za/Portals/0/Documents/Publications/EGRS%20 Policy%20Summary%20Report.pdf?ver=2017-08-15-092224-000

Early Grade Reading Studies

The Early Grade Reading Study (EGRS)5 evaluated three Setswana Home Language interventions aimed at improving reading in early grades: a teacher training intervention, an on-site training and coaching intervention and a parental involvement intervention.

These three interventions were implemented with the teachers of a cohort of learners in Grade 1 in 2015, the teachers of the same cohort of learners in Grade 2 in 2016 and the first two interventions were extended to the teachers of the same learners in Grade 3 in 2017.

RESULTS:

The results show evidence of a sustained impact from the coaching intervention on several Setswana (home language) outcomes. Although there was a significant average impact for all learners in the coaching intervention on only one of the Setswana oral reading passages, the most consistent impacts were for learners who received the maximum “dosage” of the EGRS I intervention in Grades 1 to 3 (i.e. those who progressed, as intended, through the three years of the intervention from 2015 to 2018).

Significant impacts were found for these learners on four of the seven Setswana reading outcomes (with marginally significant impacts on the rest). This provides evidence that results from an early grade reading intervention can be sustained into upper grades but also points to the importance of frequency or “dosage”.

Interestingly, the coaching intervention also showed a statistically significant impact on retention, with a smaller proportion of learner attrition than the control group (38% versus 45%).

Overall, the results are very promising for the EGRS I coaching intervention, particularly because few other research studies have shown such a sustained, longterm impact of an early grade reading programme.

If proactive measures are not taken to ensure a child has the solid foundations of early learning, their academic progress will suffer, and this could lead to them constantly falling behind and dropping out of school. As children make their way through school, those lagging behind their peers may require remedial interventions, such as accelerated learning programmes in later school years.

This learning brief will explore innovative methods already used by several civil society organisations to promote early learning and reading. These are critical interventions to close learning gaps and improve educational outcomes (as the learning brief on Strengthening Links in the Learning Chain on page 4 demonstrates).

5 This report derives from the data collection and analysis for the Early Grade Reading Study (EGRS I), the Reading Support Project (RSP) and the Language Benchmarking study in two districts in North West, South Africa. This study was conducted for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of Basic Education (DBE).

ORGANISATIONS CHAMPIONING PROACTIVE INTERVENTIONS

Proactive interventions can help to critically address weak learning foundations. The fact is that the foundational building blocks for reading happen before a child enters primary school. The first five years of life lay the groundwork for a child’s lifelong development. This is the time when children learn to learn6 Many studies have found a strong positive link between the language skills that children demonstrate in their preschool years, and their ability to learn later on in school. The early language development that occurs through storytelling and reading builds pathways to understanding and expression as the central currency for human interaction. When it occurs in a loving relationship – between a parent and child for example – it creates positive associations that promote empathy and the curiosity and imagination that underpin lifelong learning and innovation.

Unfortunately, the early childhood development (ECD) sector is not well-supported by the government. According to Ilifa Labantwana, a programme seeking to ensure all children get access to quality ECD, only 20% of the seven million children who need subsidised early learning are receiving it7

Civil society can address this deficit by increasing access to early learning programmes (ELPs) for children. Several South African NGOs have been pioneering interventions to create effective community platforms for early learning and reading.

These organisations include: Wordworks, an NGO that focuses on early language and literacy development.

Mikhulu Child Development Trust, an NGO that promotes parents and caregivers as their children’s first and best teachers.

Nal’ibali, the national reading for enjoyment campaign. Nal’ibali has drawn on both Wordworks and Mikhulu for training and resources.

SmartStart is a social franchise that aims to expand access to quality early learning in South Africa for three- to five-year-old children.

Three things stand out in all of these interventions: reading needs to be encouraged from a young age and parental involvement is imperative. These resources must also be accessible.

6 https://dgmt.co.za/early-learning-the-great-equalizer-for-south-africa/ 7 https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-08-22-women-led-ecd-sectorstill-receives-a-tiny-slice-of-the-budget-pie/

MAKE SURE EVERY CHILD IS READY TO READ BY THE TIME THEY GO TO SCHOOL

ARRIVE READY TO LEARN

Katie Huston, Chief Operating Officer of Nal’ibali, the national reading for enjoyment campaign, says that when we think of reading as a skill mainly developed in the classroom, we limit children’s potential and disempower the adults who love them.

Regardless of what kind of interventions are introduced to schools, children who arrive at school ready to learn are going to learn to read better than those who are not.

Huston expands: “You want kids to arrive with this massive vocabulary and large body of general knowledge and the alphabetic principle of knowing that a letter stands for a sound, even if they don’t know all the letters or sounds yet.”

According to international research8, children who are read one book a day will hear 290 000 more words by age five than children who are not read to.

In 2022, Nal’ibali refocused its strategy to invest more in parental involvement. During its high-profile annual campaign for World Read Aloud Day, which draws attention to the importance of reading aloud to children in their mother tongue, Nal’ibali invited more families to pledge. The rationale behind this initiative is that if families get into the habit of reading together, such practices may result in sustained behaviour change with regards to reading at home.

Currently, Nal’ibali is piloting a programme in particular communities in the Northern Cape and Free State. The team arranged parent workshops and home visits based on Wordworks’ Every Word Counts programme for parents and caregivers of young children, integrated into the Nal’ibali model of ECD centre visits, community activations, “tuk-tuk” libraries (see box below), reading clubs and reading club training.

A particularly interesting aspect of this pilot is that although Nal’ibali is deploying the same carefully designed and structured programme in these geographical regions, they have landed differently. In one community there is significant uptake, regular attendance by parents and strong engagement. In the other community, campaigners are struggling to get parents to attend meetings or make return visits.

This highlights the fact that the unique circumstance of an area will affect the impact of an intervention.

WHAT ARE TUK-TUK LIBRARIES?

“If families try reading together, they will experience short-term, immediate benefits – observing their children’s curiosity and interest, enjoying closeness and together time – which can support families to adopt these habits more long-term.

Katie Huston, COO, Nal’ibali

Nal’ibali takes a collaborative approach to activating parental participation and reached out to other organisations that have experience in this field. Huston explains: “The Nal’ibali team is skilled in training ECD practitioners, community volunteers or teachers to run reading clubs for older kids. But we needed to better understand how to encourage parents to engage with young children.”

As an approach to upskilling staff, Nal’ibali collaborated with Wordworks, an NGO that focuses on early language and literacy development, and Mikhulu Child Development Trust, an NGO that promotes parents and caregivers as their children’s first and best teachers. These organisations trained the Nal’ibali team in their methodologies and provided access to their materials.

Tuk-tuk libraries are housed in three-wheeled motor vehicles, loaded with books, stories and other reading material. The logistics, safety concerns, fleet management challenges, etc. of driving the tuk-tuks proved an unviable and extremely costly model after two years of testing. Though they are now stationary, the tuk-tuk libraries provided access to library material while municipal libraries were closed for an extended period during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. They offer a visible space for literacy activities and activations. They are stocked with children’s books in local languages.

Many parents or caregivers may not feel confident in the role of educator. This may be because they were not able to complete school themselves or because the turbulent and unequal history of education in South Africa means they may associate schooling with trauma.

SmartStart is a social franchise that aims to expand access to quality early learning for three- to five-year-old children. It has a network of more than 7 000 practitioners, or SmartStarters, working across South Africa, in rural and urban areas, running early learning programmes for children. As part of this work, SmartStarters are supported to include story-sharing daily in their programme with children, to encourage a love of reading and the development of pre-literacy skills. Additionally, SmartStarters are equipped and encouraged to support primary caregivers to continue this learning and the development of early reading skills at home.

Kirsty Paxton, SmartStart’s Early Learning and Design Manager, says: “Often parents don’t realise the value of storytelling or just talking with their child. Probably a huge part of it is the culture of education in this country and the idea that education is something that happens only at school, particularly in a formal school setting.”

Wordworks partners with NGOs such as Nal’ibali that integrate their programmes into home visits and community work with schools and centres, where teachers run workshops for parents. Jane Coombe, Head of Programmes at Wordworks, says their team has worked for nearly 20 years to change parents’ perception of their role and to share simple activities for them to try at home.

“Our school system alone isn’t able to compensate for five years without learning stimulation and exposure to rich language stimulation. Our Every Word Counts programme and ‘parent programmes’ were developed to build parents’ confidence to facilitate informal language learning at home.”

PARENTS AS LEARNING PARTNERS

During the COVID-19 pandemic, more teachers recognised parents as learning partners, particularly with children too young to direct their own learning at home. In this context, Wordworks created a home learning programme, Together In My Education (TIME), endorsed by the Western Cape Education Department (WCED). Hard copy packs in English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa were sent home to 50 000 families during 2021 and again in 2022, providing fun, skills-based, daily activities for caregivers to do with their children.

The model was for materials to be managed by schools, so Wordworks provided Grade R and Grade 1 teachers with online sessions and access to multimedia messages that they could share with parents through a data-free website. Teachers were urged to set up WhatsApp groups and to hold meetings to support caregivers to guide the learning process at home.

Wordworks’ Every Word Counts programme can be used across a range of community settings to introduce knowledge about early learning to those who care for, and work with, babies and young children. It provides practical ideas for supporting the development of early language and literacy from birth to five years of age. Organisations can integrate the programme and resources into their work with parents and caregivers through home visits or parent groups. ECD practitioners and playgroup facilitators are encouraged to run a series of workshops for their parents.

The Home-School Partnerships programme builds co-operation between families and schools, while supporting and encouraging parents in their role as their children’s first teachers.

“Once parents understand the difference they can make, we have found they are almost always willing to try. Once they do, their experiences are overwhelmingly positive, often changing their relationship with their children in very profound ways,” says Coombe. But the challenge is finding scalable models to reach parents.

There is early evidence that the programme establishes a relationship of learning between the parent and the child, and a relationship of support between the teacher and parent. At an annual cost of R50 per family and with system buy-in, it has the potential to scale. Wordworks is conducting a longitudinal study to understand factors for successful uptake in homes, as well as the impact of the programme on children.

MAKE SURE EVERY CHILD IS READY TO READ BY THE TIME THEY GO TO SCHOOL

“If we don’t intentionally engage with parents and caregivers, ECD practitioners, pre-Grade R and Grade R teachers so they can build strong oral language and emergent literacy skills, we are simply just landing the Grade 1 teachers with the same phenomenon year after year – children who are completely unfamiliar with what is being provided to them. They can’t yet hear the sounds in words, they don’t recognise that letters link to sounds, they don’t know that words in books contain meaning, or that they have the power to initiate text. They don’t have such tacit emergent literacy knowledge that makes it possible to make sense of and benefit from what the teacher is doing.”

Jane Coombe, Head of Programmes, Wordworks

Coombe explains: “So we are building an oral to written language connection in those two-week cycles, repeating the process with a new story focus each fortnight.”

The Wordworks Grade R programme has been taken to all public-school Grade R classrooms in the Western Cape and Gauteng. The open-source programme is now available in all South African languages.

BOOK-SHARING DEVELOPS RELATIONSHIPS AND LANGUAGE

Book-sharing is a two-way interaction between a parent and a young child between the ages of one to five using a wordless picture book.

“Research shows when a child is in a secure relationship with the parent they are better equipped to benefit from stimulation and actually develop better resilience,” says Kaathima Ebrahim, CEO of the Mikhulu Child Development Trust. This NGO focuses on developing evidence-based programmes for parents and caregivers of young children.

ORAL TO WRITTEN LANGUAGE

Coombe says that as part of her organisation’s contribution to quality education, Wordworks developed two classroom programmes designed to build strong oral home language and emergent literacy skills through playful, interactive, story-based activities.

These Wordworks classroom programmes, Stellar (Grade R) and Little Stars (pre-Grade R), take a body of language around a story and use it purposefully over two weeks of teaching. The same story has activities built around it, which bring the child into relationship with the story language (vocabulary and syntax), characters, context and themes. In the first week, all interaction is oral, and in the second week the child encounters text forms that also relate to the story. Children naturally learn that oral language can be represented in pictures and writing, in published books and in their own drawings.

Mikhulu researched different programmatic interventions that could best support a child’s early development in terms of cognitive and socio-emotional development and found that book-sharing had the most impact. In a randomised control trial of children aged 14 months, the language of those who participated in the book-sharing study, far outweighed those in the control group. It also improved concentration levels. Booksharing has also shown to improve the nature of the parentchild relationship, helping the parent engage with the child in a more sensitive and reciprocal way.

Ebrahim says: “A strong language foundation and the ability to sit and focus helps children learning to read.” Ebrahim shares that her organisation did not invent the technique of engaging children using wordless picture books, but turned it into a programmatic intervention relevant to the South African context.

The programme consists of eight weekly group sessions with a trained facilitator for parents. Each parent can practise what they have learnt in the session and is given a resource to take home and use with their child.

IMPACT TAKES TIME

Ebrahim says a common request is for the programme to be conducted over one day. It is possible, but it will not have the same impact because this method has proven to be most effective working with families over several weeks. Mikhulu has developed instructional guides, because partners occasionally want to donate the picture books to parents but these parents do not know how to use them.

Mikhulu capacitates community-based organisations or government partners to use their book-sharing programme. During the pandemic, when this was not possible, Mikhulu developed a series of video resources to help parents learn about book-sharing. It is currently working with the Western Cape Department of Health to train community health workers to bring book-sharing and early stimulation into homes.

Advantages of book-sharing:

can be done in any language; parent does not have to be literate; community workers are trained to support parents; builds a stronger parent-child relationship; and lays the foundations for lifelong learning.

STIMULATING A LOVE OF READING

SmartStart also employs other methods to promote a love of reading. The daily routine for SmartStarters includes half an hour for sharing stories, and group activities often link to the stories.

SmartStart has long recognised the pivotal role of parents and caregivers in learning. Paxton says: “Parents and caregivers are so important. The how of involving them can sometimes be challenging.” Since SmartStart’s previous approach of monthly meetings did not have the desired uptake, it is now implementing four family fun days a year:

SmartStart also advocates book-sharing with wordless picture books. Ten picture stories, each printed onto a single A4 page folded up into a booklet, have recently been added to the SmartStart curriculum. The booklet is sent home with children, together with an activity sheet (translated into 11 languages) to support caregivers at home and stimulate the joy of reading.

The additional resource promotes learning interaction between parent and child and increases SmartStarters’ value in the eyes of the parents. As the stories are wordless, this supports families with low literacy levels too.

an open day welcoming parents and caregivers at the start of the year; a play day promoting the importance of learning through play in the home; a story day promoting the importance of families sharing stories in the home; and an end-of-year celebration or “graduation”.

SmartStarters are encouraged to build relationships with parents by meeting with them regularly, communicating with them via WhatsApp groups and sharing progress reports twice a year.

SURE EVERY CHILD IS READY TO READ BY THE TIME THEY GO TO SCHOOL

THE NEXT CHAPTER

As this learning brief has illustrated, schools cannot be solely responsible for preparing our children to read with understanding. Government, civil society, and communities have a role to play in laying the essential foundations of learning to ensure children will have the best chance of advancing to the next chapter.

This learning brief was developed by Daniella Horwitz in conjunction with Nal’ibali, Wordworks, SmartStart and Mikhulu Child Development Trust.

About the contributors

Nal’ibali (isiXhosa for “here’s the story”) is a national reading-forenjoyment campaign targeting children between the ages of one and 10. It seeks to spark and embed a culture of reading across South Africa, so that reading, writing and sharing stories – in all South African languages – is part of everyday life. Nal’ibali maintains that children who read and hear engaging stories in languages they understand are well equipped and motivated to learn to read and write. Nal’ibali web and mobi sites are now zero-rated.

Wordworks is a South African non-profit organisation that focuses on early language and literacy development in the first eight years of children’s lives. Since 2005, it has worked in low-resource communities with those adults best positioned to impact on young children’s language and literacy development. Wordworks offers training, resources and support for partners who wish to use its early language and literacy programmes in their own networks. All its programmes include messaging about the importance of language for literacy development and the need to build children’s home language in the early years as a foundation for the acquisition of a second language. The Wordworks main site and home literacy sites are zero-rated.

SmartStart provides a pragmatic, affordable solution to rapidly expand access to quality early learning. The franchised programme is delivered through playgroups, day mothers and early childhood development (ECD) centre classrooms to improve children’s readiness for learning, school performance and overall life success.

By 2030, SmartStart aims to reach one million children between the ages of three and five every year.

Mikhulu Child Development Trust promotes parents as being their young children’s first and best teachers. The trust contributes to the development of a systemic approach where support for parents is part of a holistic ECD ecosystem, and they are supported to do the best for their young children.