Strengthening Links in the Learning Chain: The Value of Accelerated Learning Programmes

Support young people to keep their grip on opportunity

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Accelerated Learning Programmes

10STRENGTHENING LINKS IN THE LEARNING CHAIN: THE VALUE OF ACCELERATED LEARNING PROGRAMMES

In South Africa, poor reading proficiency in schools has been compounded by pandemic-era learning losses. Accelerated Learning Programmes (ALPs), in various forms, can help address this deficit because they are designed to support children who are constantly falling behind. This learning brief explores how ALPs can help fill the gaps in our schooling system.

Academic performance is influenced by a learner’s ability to read for meaning. But far too many children in South Africa’s schooling system lack this crucial skill. There are several reasons why; perhaps first and foremost is the long neglect of the early childhood development (ECD) 1 sector – a topic that is explored on page 11. Many children start school without the foundational building blocks they need to be ready to learn to read.

Children in the foundation phase (Grade R to Grade 3), learn the mechanics of reading (phonetics, sentence structure and sense-making), so that from the intermediate phase (Grade 4 to Grade 6) onwards, they can use these skills to acquire knowledge. Lessons move from “learning to read” to “reading to learn”, with pupils using textbooks to understand new concepts in various subjects in their school curriculum. The curriculum is built on the assumption that learning is linear, yet this is not the reality for many learners.

4Statistics tell us that even before the COVID-19 pandemic many children had weak foundational learning, particularly in literacy 2 and maths 3, but this does not mean there hasn’t been any progress in outcome trends since 20114 Nevertheless, the pandemic has set many children back. Due to disrupted schooling in 2020 and 2021, Grade 4 children lost 1.3 years 5 of learning according to the Department of Basic Education (DBE).

Socio-economic factors such as overcrowding in classrooms, lack of parental support and minimal reading resources in schools also contribute to the fact that many learners find themselves without the basic foundational literacy and numeracy skills they need when they enter Grade 4. According to education policy, learners who are failing academically are only allowed to repeat one year per phase of their schooling 6. Thus, children are progressed to the next grade regardless of their reading ability. Without effective remedial classes, the chain of learning is effectively broken. But the links can be reconnected.

1 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 it.

2 https://nicspaull.com/2017/12/05/the-unfolding-reading-crisis-the-newpirls-2016-results/

3 https://www.gov.za/speeches/minister-angie-motshekga-and-humansciences-research-council-release-timss-2019-grade-9

4 https://resep.sun.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/wp022020.pdf

5 https://www.news24.com/news24/southafrica/news/south-africanchildren-have-lost-13-years-of-schooling-due-to-covid-19-20220203

6 In 1998, the Admission Policy for Ordinary Public Schools was adopted which stipulates that the guideline for repetition is “one year per school phase where necessary”.

VICIOUS VERSUS VIRTUOUS

GOVERNMENT CANNOT DO IT ALONE

South Africa spends more than 6% of its GDP on education6 –among the highest in the world – and achieves among the poorest outcomes considering the size of the investment. This is largely the consequence of South Africa’s “inequality trap” where the poorest children, who often enter Grade 1 with learning deficits, typically receive poor quality education.

Through the lens of “formal education”, all children have the same endpoint but not all children reach it in the same amount of time. Civil society organisations are key players in creating enabling conditions for the realisation of education reform. This can be achieved by capacitating schools to implement programmes with the aim of improving education outcomes.

Accelerated Learning Programmes (ALPs) or “catch-up” initiatives are implemented in various countries to support vulnerable children who do not have access to schooling because of crises, conflicts or dropping out of school. Typically, the learning process happens over a short period of time. ALPs differ from education enrichment, weekend classes or holiday programmes aimed at improving learning outcomes. They are designed to support children who are below the expected academic level for their age group and to bridge the essential learning gap, thus strengthening the chain of learning.

DGMT-funded projects are involved in ALPs aimed at redressing educational inequity:

Reading for Meaning7 (a programme of the Zero Dropout Campaign8) focuses on Grade 5 learners; and Acorn Education9 (in collaboration with Public School Partnerships10) implements a reading intervention to help Grade 7 learners transition into high school.

These projects seek to change the trajectory of learners who have fallen behind so they are better positioned to keep their grip on opportunity.

ADDRESSING GAPS IN FOUNDATIONAL LITERACY SKILLS

Pumza Ndamase, Project Lead for Reading for Meaning, says a learner’s poor academic performance is an indicator that they are likely to drop out of school. About 40% of learners drop out of school before completing matric, and the Zero Dropout Campaign is working toward halving this rate by 2030. Weak foundational literacy is a major reason why learners struggle academically and may have to repeat a year or more.

It is important to note that there is no guarantee that repeating a year will improve reading skills if the necessary support and resources are not available for struggling learners.

Often these learners become demotivated and disengaged from schooling, eventually dropping out of school. The Reading for Meaning programme is part of the campaign’s strategy to address poor academic performance at an early stage so learners can gain the foundational literacy and numeracy skills they need to stay motivated and on track to complete their schooling.

Reading for Meaning aims to help learners who are struggling to keep up with their peers. It uses the internationally recognised Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) methodology, which focuses on a child’s learning needs rather than their age or grade to support learners who missed key literacy and numeracy concepts early in the foundation phase of their learning journey. The programme runs after-school sessions with Grade 5 learners in low-resource

“If a child leaves the foundation phase without being able to read, they step into the vicious cycle because they are constantly trying to catch up and they are limited in terms of what they can learn. If they can read, they step into the virtuous cycle, because they are unlimited in terms of what they can read and learn.”

Celeste Abrahams, Acorn Education Instructional Coach

communities in the Eastern Cape, Western Cape and KwaZuluNatal by training community volunteers, known as Reader Leaders, to facilitate 30 sessions over 16 weeks.

Learners are divided into four different groups depending on their reading ability (whether they are able to recognise letters, words, or read sentences with comprehension). Throughout the 16-week programme, learners in the programme are regularly assessed to determine whether they can move to the next level. Reader Leaders teach in English, translating into a learner’s mother tongue if necessary. Currently, there is a bilingual pilot (in terms of teaching, workbooks and resources) in English and IsiZulu in KwaZulu-Natal. The programme aims to add another home language each year, depending on the province.

PROGRAMME FINDINGS:

In 2021, the Reading for Meaning programme began with 35% of learners at letter and word level. At the end of the programme cycle, more than 70% of learners were able to read at paragraph level, which is an indication of their ability to read for meaning. So far, the programme has reached more than 2 000 learners.

ABUKWE’S STORY

*Abukwe is a 12-year-old boy who was raised at a place of safety for a year until his paternal grandmother decided to take him and look after him. He now lives in Parkside in East London with his father, little brother and grandmother.

He attends *Willow Primary and is repeating Grade 5 because his teachers say that he cannot read and write. He was referred by his class teacher, *Mrs Martins, to an educational psychologist because he was not coping with schoolwork, and it was suggested by some in his school that he may need to attend a special learning institution to cater to his needs. His grandmother refused to send him to another school and insisted that all he needed was someone who could understand him and help him learn at his level.

While Abukwe was on the waiting list to be assessed by a psychologist, the Reading for Meaning programme was introduced at his school and he was selected to participate.

He did not miss a single session. Before he started the programme, his teachers described him as a playful child who did not take his schoolwork seriously. But things turned around when he started developing basic reading skills through the programme, received intentional supervision and one-on-one mentoring.

Mrs Martins says: “I saw a huge difference in Abukwe’s academic record as he managed to pass all his subjects and he is also able to do individual activities.”

Abukwe feels “happy” about his own progress. His favourite story in the Reading for Meaning programme is the Singing Sack because he loves the main song in the story.

*Names have been changed.

LEARNING GAPS WIDEN

OVER TIME

Learners who start high school without strong foundational literacy skills are at risk of constantly falling behind if the gaps in their learning are compounded and widen. Acorn Education, a non-profit company that supports no-fee schools in providing quality education, aims to ease this problem by targeting learners before they transition into high school. Acorn works in the community of Eerste River in the Western Cape – an area traditionally underserved and home to children impacted by poverty. Celeste Abrahams, Acorn Education Instructional Coach, says: “We’ve observed that many learners are not ready for high school in terms of their reading comprehension; they start Grade 8 with learning barriers that were initiated in primary school.”

The Acorn team found that although there are many highquality apps and interventions that schools can use to support learners academically, some of their reading levels are so low that they struggle to utilise these digital learning tools without programmatic support or mentoring. For example, Reflective Learning is a maths app that has shown positive results11 However, Acorn coaches have seen learners struggle to work on the maths app, not because they can’t do maths, but because they can’t read the explanations and instructions. In August 2021, Acorn Education and Apex High School piloted a reading intervention that focused on teaching learners how to read before they entered high school so they could advance academically once they got there.

The programme targeted the Grade 7 cohort of learners transitioning into Grade 8 at Apex High. The objective was to get them reading at Grade 6 level (as a minimum) and it ran for nine weeks. Students had the choice of instruction in English or Afrikaans, depending on their learning stream. The programme aimed at remediating specific gaps, and intentionally supporting learners in essential skill areas such as reading fluency, vocabulary, phonics, phonemic awareness and comprehension. These are foundational skills that, if not mastered, may cause learners to work persistently below their grade level. The effectiveness of this project was determined by comparing the results of a baseline test and a post-test.

ACORN EDUCATOR REPORTS BACK

PROGRAMME FINDINGS:

A total of 179 learners took the baseline test, which used Grade 6 reading-level texts as a yardstick. Before the project, only 53 were reading at Grade 6 level. A total of 126 were identified as “at risk”. Of these, 62 showed significant gaps in early literacy development and essentially struggled to decode basic words. These learners were identified independently as “seriously at risk” and were provided with reading remediation in smaller groups, in addition to online interventions. Each learner who participated in the small group sessions was given a reading book to take home. For many of them it was the first time they had owned a book.

After the nine-week programme, the 126 learners who were “at risk” or “seriously at risk” were invited to complete a similar Grade 6 reading assessment. The improvement was significant: 76 out of the 126 learners (60%) scored proficiently in the post-intervention Grade 6 assessment!

“My colleague and I were very excited to hand out books. The excitement soon turned into a mix of emotions when we observed some of the scholars’ responses. Firstly, all of them were surprised that they could keep the books. They doublechecked to find out if they could take them home. One of the boys, *James – I distinctly recall – smelled the pages of his book. I asked him why and he told me that it was the first time he owned a book that was not for schoolwork and also ‘new-new’. He told me his primary school didn’t have a library and his classroom only had textbooks.”

*Names have been changed.

GRIP

23 learners were unable to complete the assessment and were expected to complete it at a later stage.

The 27 learners who are still either “At Risk” or “Seriously at Risk” (most of whom are Afrikaans Higher Language) will continue to be supported.

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WHAT CAN CIVIL SOCIETY LEARN FROM ACCELERATED LEARNING PROGRAMMES?

We can learn how to address the inequity in our schooling system from these initiatives. As Abrahams points out: “The impact is huge; this is the onset of bringing about educational reform in terms of equity… we know that learners who enjoy reading independently will have the door opened to knowledge, new interests and confidence.”

Acorn started by defining what a proficient reader is (learners who can negotiate the grade-level materials in a way that uses flexible thinking and allows them to make inferences beyond the text). Abrahams explains: “Be intentional about which skills need to be remediated and avoid teaching them in isolation or disconnected from the pupil’s current learning.”

Here are five main takeaways from the two projects discussed in this brief:

1 Have a clear goal

Decide what it is you want to achieve and how. Explore various methodologies and do the necessary research to ensure that they can work in the South African context. Identifying which achievement gaps to close can take many forms, but basically, the gap that Acorn was concerned with is the disparity in performance between what children are expected to have learned and what they had learned and mastered to date. To help identify the gaps,

Nurture relationships

It is important to nurture relationships with the different stakeholders involved in an accelerated learning programme. An essential element is to procure the buy-in of schools and caregivers so that the programme can access children in a safe environment while caregivers are able to support reading at home. In the pilot phase of the Reading for Meaning programme, the process of relationship building and securing buy-in stretched the time and resources of the programme’s core staff. It was only when implementing partners12 took on this role and responsibility that the process became easier as they already had established relationships with communities and schools. Implementing partners also enabled the programme to scale up and reach more children.

Acorn Education had an existing relationship with Apex High School, so the challenge there was around building relationships with a new cohort of children and parents. In the first three weeks, learner attendance was 80%, however it dwindled during the examination period, declining to 50% over the remainder of the programme. Regular communication with parents and learners’ primary schools allowed Acorn to contextualise the work they were doing, and this mitigated some of the attendance issues.

2 3

Focus on the learner

ALPs are meant to meet learners at their own level in small group settings. Abrahams maintains that it is still important to maintain rigour and encourage the learner to use their foundational skills. A learner-centric approach helps to accelerate learning in a short space of time.

Ndamase adds: “We encourage a positive learning environment where learners are able to use their voice, engage and ask questions, which is not often the case in many learning spaces. In many cases, their parents have noted not only a positive change in academic behaviour but also a boost in the child’s confidence.”

Implementing partners have also seen an increase in support from the schools in terms of assisting learners and integrating them back into the classroom.

12 Teenagers and Youth Health SA – KZN (eShowe), National Association of Child Care Workers (NACCW) – KZN, Social Change – EC (Mthatha), Lisebanzi Foundation –EC (East London), Masibumbane Development Organisation – EC (East London).

Reading for Meaning adopted the TaRL methodology because it showed results in other developing countries, is cost-effective in terms of resources and relatively easy to implement. Additionally, trainers do not need to have a teaching qualification. Implementing partners train and mentor volunteers who are unemployed young people, able to read and enthusiastic about sharing this skill.

Flexibility is also an integral requirement. Part of the Acorn intervention was to create a buddy reading segment, where learners partner with someone and take turns reading the same book for enjoyment. Acorn needed to procure Hi/Lo reading books for this activity (Hi/Lo refers to books that have a high interest level and a low vocabulary or readability level). Contrary to popular belief, it was a challenge to find suitable books for this group due to availability. To supplement the books, Acorn ended up creating reading materials or editing complicated passages to fit the criteria.

THE PATH AHEAD

The success of Acorn’s pre-Grade 8 learning intervention was such that the school governing body has now amended its admissions policy to state that completion of the assessments and participation in the programmes are mandatory for admission to the school. Both Acorn and Reading for Meaning are currently testing numeracy ALPs for roll-out in the future.

“We are at a critical point that requires investment from all parties: private sector, civil society and government. Government departments must put forward policies that further reform,” says Ndamase.

Abrahams agrees that education reform does not lie at the door of government. Civil society organisations can assist by pooling their resources toward levelling the academic playing field.

If we are not able to turn this around, especially after all the learning losses from COVID-19, it is going to have severe repercussions for South Africa. We must provide accessible, sustainable, effective programmes that help learners catch up and perform better so they can benefit from the education they deserve. And we must do it now.

Health issues may be the real barrier

Acorn ensured that all learners went for health screenings to check their vision, hearing and other general health concerns. Often there are non-scholastic problems that interfere with a learner’s ability to learn. The screenings help detect these problems, which are often subtle and go unnoticed for years.

During 2021, 348 learners in Acorn programmes were screened for potential learning barriers, with 40% referred for medical attention.

“It is not beyond our power to create a world in which all children have access to a good education. Those who do not believe this have small imaginations.”

Nelson Mandela

This is the learning experience of:

WWW.DGMT.CO.ZA

Learning brief developed by Daniella Horwitz with contributions from Reading for Meaning and Acorn Education.

4Programmes should be cost-effective, user-friendly and adaptable