Gwarube says SA needs to focus more on early learning

Basic education minister Siviwe Gwarube says South Africa needs to intensify its efforts to strengthen the foundational phases of schooling to improve final results.

Gwarube feels the country has had a culture of placing too much emphasis on secondary education and not enough on getting the basics right, she told the Sunday Times in an interview.

“I congratulate the class of 2025 and I’m very proud of them, as they’ve now done a record-breaking 88% pass rate. But I would want us to focus less on this big national number … because I think it sometimes distracts us away from the other quality indicators in the system.

“In South Africa there’s an obsession with matric and the matric pass rate, and I’m not saying that is not important, but I have decided that it’s important to invert the pyramid — that we must obsess about the foundations of learning, because a matric pass rate is an exit indicator.

“If you focus on early childhood development — grade R, grades 1 to 4 — that tells you what kind of education system you are building. Those indicators matter more than the one at the end because the one at the end just tells you how you did. But if we focus on the foundations of learning, we are going to be far better off, and we’re not going to be in intervention land.”

Gwarube remains concerned about the uptake and performance in maths, science and accounting, as well as retaining pupils between grades 10 and 12.

The big crisis is between grades 10 and 12. We lost a lot of learners in those grades

—  Siviwe Gwarube, basic education minister

She said she had analysed the data, and the good news was that about 66% of all bachelor passes were from quintile 1 to 3 schools, and some were from pupils living with disabilities.

“The numbers are also telling us that while there’s an increase in the uptake of maths and science, the performance is not as [good] as we would like it to be. About 34% of learners who sat for the NSC exams wrote core maths.”

Critics have questioned the pass rate, suggesting it is not a true reflection of reality, as hundreds of thousands of children drop out of the system before they reach matric.

Gwarube said government research showed a high retention rate of pupils between grades 1 and 10, as only 4% of learners dropped out in those years. “The big crisis is between grades 10 and 12. We lost a lot of learners in those grades.”

She said many boys stayed in those grades for too long and then left and did not come back, while girls who fell pregnant would return to school after having babies. Researchers were looking into the reasons boys dropped out more often than girls and what interventions could be introduced in those grades.

Gwarube has begun reorienting her department to focus on the foundations of learning. The department has also taken over early childhood development (ECD) from the department of social development, as provided for in the Bela Act.

“That’s why my priority is very much extending ECD across the country for as many children as possible. The data tells us only 42% of South African children are developed mentally and on track by the time they turn four or five.

“That has an impact on how they perform in school because … it means they won’t be school-ready when they get to grades R and 1.”

One of her priorities is to make sure children access structured education and care so that they are able to recognise and write words by the time they get to grade 1 and are able to read and write for meaning by the time they finish grade 3.

“That’s how you fix your maths, science, accounting problem, because if children can’t read for meaning, they’ll never catch up. They’ll keep moving through the system, but they’ll perform very poorly. The way I look at the system is that matric results are literally built from two years old when a child enters an ECD centre.”

Gwarube, who is a former DA national spokesperson and was its chief whip in the National Assembly before the 2024 elections, says she will throw her name into the hat for a leadership position when the party holds its elective congress in April.

For now she is mum about which position she will contest, but it will “absolutely not” be for party leader.

“I am not ready to lead the DA at this point in time. I think I’ve been given a very big responsibility of leading the education sector in the country,” she said.

“However, I am considering running for a leadership position within the organisation because ultimately the DA is changing; it has to adapt. We’re now not only a party of local government and provincial government, we’re a party of national government.

“We have to think about how we leverage the work that we do in national government to showcase to South Africans that we can be trusted with their votes.”