This time last year, I took an oath to assume the office of South Africa’s Minister of Basic Education. I did so with a clear conscience that I would hold this office with dignity and to the very best of my abilities.
My first order of business was to listen deeply, to be guided by the evidence, and to reform strategically. Over the last 12 months, I have travelled the length and breadth of our country. I have, on average, visited one school per week. I’ve met provincial leaders and officials, school principals, teachers, parents and, most importantly, learners.
Their stories and realities have shaped everything we have done since.
Our work has been guided by a simple, yet powerful statistic: 80% of children in South Africa cannot read for meaning in any language by Grade 4. This has told me that we need to get the basics right.
If our children cannot read for meaning by age 10, if they face unsafe sanitation, if they come to school hungry or unsupported in their earliest years, then everything else we do will fall apart as it is based on weak foundations.
Strategic reorientation of the basic education system
Based on the low levels of literacy and numeracy, we launched a major shift in how the Department of Basic Education approaches its work: the strategic reorientation towards improving the quality of foundational learning.
Chasing surface metrics, such as the matric pass rate, will not move the needle in terms of the number of learners leaving the system with the skills needed to pursue further studies or enter the world of work. We need to get the foundations right if we are to see improved education outcomes across the system. Foundational learning cannot be a peripheral concern and must therefore be the centrepiece of our basic education reform agenda.
Early childhood development: laying the first brick in the foundation
In February 2025, I co-convened the Bana Pele Roadmap Summit with Business Leadership South Africa, which was opened by President Cyril Ramaphosa. This was a seminal moment in mobilising stakeholders around the importance of early learning.
In partnership with Takalani Sesame, we are rolling out the Bana Pele Mass Registration Drive – a national campaign to register, formalise and support early childhood development centres, especially in the most underprivileged communities.
Our goal here is bold: we want to register 10,000 centres by the end of the current financial year, to formalise them and to support them to comply with their local government health and safety requirements. We will furthermore subsidise them with R17 per child per day to ensure their financial viability. This is proposed to increase to R24 in the new budget.
We won’t stop there. We will also support them with age-appropriate learning and teaching materials required for children to follow a structured curriculum. Finally, we will then upskill practitioners to acquire a teaching qualification that would allow them to deliver a quality curriculum.
In the Foundation Phase, we have continued rolling out the Mother Tongue-based Bilingual Education programme, training teachers in bilingual methods and providing quality support materials.
The Funza Lushaka Bursary Scheme and teacher development efforts are being augmented to prioritise Foundation Phase teaching, aligned to our focus on literacy and numeracy. Furthermore, we are reviewing Post Provisioning Norms to improve teacher distribution and buffer provinces against budget pressures. We are also updating the National Catalogue for grades 1 to 3 to ensure learners receive high-quality, curriculum-aligned materials.
Without these foundations, a child will face challenges taking on and excelling in gateway subjects like mathematics and science, or technical, vocational and occupational subjects. This, in turn, impacts on their ability to pursue higher learning and meaningful work opportunities.
The mere introduction of entrepreneurship education, coding and robotics and the like is no magic wand. These subjects become accessible only when learners are literate and numerate.
Nutrition reform with integrity
We made a bold decision to halt a R10-billion per year tender that would have hyper-centralised the National School Nutrition Programme in the hands of a single service provider, thereby risking the wellbeing of 9.6 million learners who depend on the NSNP for their daily meal. The current model of delivering school nutrition will continue, and we will strengthen provincial capacity to deliver while we work on a revised, balanced delivery strategy.
Infrastructure justice: sanitation first
We are turning the page on pit toilets and moving away from one of the most painful chapters in our country: when children would fall and drown in pit toilets in democratic South Africa.
In April, I announced that 96% of the pit latrines identified by the 2018 Safe Initiative audit had been eradicated. Today, that has increased to 97%. This eradication project is about dignity, safety, and our moral obligation to learners and their teachers.
The work of identifying and eradicating unsafe sanitation facilities not identified by the Safe Initiative must continue by provincial education departments (PEDs). What the DBE is doing to support this: (a) Safe Schools Act; (b) focus on maintenance; (c) supporting PEDs with planning, development and maintenance; and (d) reviewing the Regulations on the Minimum Uniform Norms and Standards.
A hard look at provincial finances
In September 2024, we undertook a deep financial analysis of all nine provincial education departments. I will not hide the reality of our financial situation from the people of South Africa. In November 2024, I shared the findings of that analysis and informed the public that we are facing a fiscal crisis.
Ten years of austerity measures have left our sector with a deep financial hole. If the current funding levels continue, we will see seven of the nine PEDs fall into the red and be unable to fund their budgets by 2028.
I can assure South Africans that we will not fold our arms and lament the poor financial decisions of the previous administration. We are putting in place financial recovery plans and we are working with provincial and national treasuries to protect education funding and to ensure that provincial education departments can get back on their feet.
I must again be honest with South Africans, this will be a painful exercise; we will have to swallow bitter medicine to fix the financial health of our education system. We will conduct nationwide audits to root out ghost teachers and ghost learners in our system; we will have to right-size departments to ensure personnel costs go back to under 80% of the budget.
We find ourselves in a mess not of our making, but the mess is ours to resolve.
Institutional and policy reform: the National Education and Training Council
To enhance policy development in the sector, we are operationalising the National Education and Training Council. This advisory body will provide evidence-based recommendations to me as minister on a range of complex school education-related issues.
These will include a review of the resourcing model applicable to schooling; exploring ways to reduce administrative burdens on teachers; and considering whether the progression and promotion requirements remain fit for purpose.
This is not just another council of government. It is a structure provided for in law comprising specialists from a variety of disciplines related to education who will volunteer their expertise, knowledge and experience to ensure that national education policies are responsive to the realities on the ground.
Looking ahead
This first year in office has laid the groundwork and shown our strategic intent. But reform is about action, not just intent. It will take political courage and cross-sector partnerships to make this strategic reorientation a success. We must be willing to break resistance to the reforms the sector so desperately needs. We must accelerate support for teachers, scale early learning innovations and stabilise provincial spending.
My message to every parent, teacher, learner and policymaker is this: we are building strong foundations for our schooling system that must work for our children.
Let’s walk this road together. DM