Eighty percent of South African children cannot read for meaning by Grade 4. This is the statistic which has guided my work as the Minister of Basic Education. When I assumed office this number was to me a national alarm bell. If children cannot read by age 10, if they attend schools without safe sanitation, if they learn while hungry, then every subsequent phase of education stands on shaky ground.
This is why in my first address to Parliament as a minister, I committed our administration to five priorities that would become the backbone of a strategic reorientation of the entire education system:
- Expanding access to and quality of Early Childhood Development (ECD).
- Improving literacy and numeracy.
- Advancing inclusive education.
- Accelerating teacher development.
- Strengthening school safety and infrastructure.
What is now evident is that these reforms are not temporary interventions. They represent a permanent and irreversible shift in how South Africa will deliver basic education.
For too long, the system has celebrated surface-level indicators – chief among them the matric pass rate, without interrogating whether the foundations were strong enough to sustain real learning. This era has ended.
We are fundamentally reorganising the system so that literacy and numeracy outcomes in the early grades guide how we resource schools, train teachers, deploy educators and measure success. Our goal is simple: to ensure that every child acquires the skills to meaningfully engage with Mathematics, Science and the broader curriculum in later grades.
This shift is visible in classrooms across the country. In November 2025, we celebrated the first bilingual Grade 4 examinations in Natural Science and Technology, followed by Mathematics. The expansion of Mother Tongue-Based Bilingual Education is becoming one of the most significant reforms of the democratic era, one that will shape how future generations learn and succeed.
In February 2025, in partnership with Business Leadership South Africa, we convened the Bana Pele Leadership Roadmap Summit, opened by President Cyril Ramaphosa, and for the first time we produced a unified national roadmap for early learning across the country. A roadmap for universal Early Childhood Development access agreed to by business, civil society and the government.
Bold target
At the start of 2025 we set a bold target to register 10,000 Early Childhood Development centres by the end of 2025. We surpassed that goal by September, three months ahead of time. Today more than 12,000 centres are formally registered and eligible to apply for financial support in the form of a R24-per-child-per-day subsidy. This has unlocked financial stability for centres, especially in rural and township communities.
Crucially, Early Childhood Development practitioners, many of them grandmothers running community crèches, are earmarked for support to obtain formal qualifications. We are currently negotiating with a major South African bank to donate funding for the upskilling of 7,000 practitioners, ensuring quality becomes the defining feature of early learning.
On 1 December 2025 I launched a R496-million fund to turbocharge access to Early Childhood Development programmes. We aim to create 1.1 million additional spaces for safe, quality early learning over the next five years. It is ambitious, yes. But it is necessary. Because a stronger basic education system begins long before Grade 1.
Our education system cannot flourish if teachers continue to be over-concentrated in the senior phases of our system. In 2025 we are working to ensure that teaching resources are deployed strategically. We have therefore initiated a long-overdue review of the Post Provisioning Norms, the first review in more than two decades. This review will ensure that educator posts are allocated in a way that reflects our foundational learning priorities, reduces class sizes in the early grades, and corrects historical imbalances that saw secondary schools better staffed than primary schools.
At the same time, the Funza Lushaka Bursary Scheme is being refined to prioritise bursaries to student teachers who wish to pursue a career in Foundation Phase teaching, while the Catalogue of Learning and Teaching Materials in Grades 1-3 is being updated to guarantee quality in every classroom.
Restoring dignity
One of the most painful remnants of our past is the existence of pit latrines.
In April 2025, I announced that 96% of pit latrines identified in the 2018 Safe audit had been eradicated. Today, that number has increased to 98%, and we will not rest until the 2018 backlog is eradicated, and we will then begin a new audit to see what, if any, pit toilets remain.
But dignity is also about safety. We have seen horrifying visuals of learner-on-learner violence in schools. We have heard stories of teachers being gunned down in school premises. While these incidents are disturbing, they are not reflective of the current state of school safety.
Violence in our schools is on a downward trend. This year, we signed a strengthened School Safety Protocol with the South African Police Service, which prioritises early violence prevention, rapid police response, and joint action against drugs, weapons, gangsterism and school-based gender-based violence. While violent incidents are declining, they remain unacceptably high and we will accelerate the rollout during the Back to School period.
Our provincial financial analysis report revealed a harsh reality: years of austerity have pushed seven of nine provinces towards unsustainable budget trajectories. We are confronting this crisis honestly. Each province has been instructed to submit financial recovery plans, supported by national and provincial treasuries.
The education sector must stabilise. That means eliminating “ghost” teachers and learners, right-sizing staffing structures, and ensuring personnel budgets remain below 80% of total expenditure. These decisions are difficult but necessary.
In 2025 we conducted a nationwide verification of employees to root out ghost employees. This will get us closer to sustainable finances for our provinces.
This year I operationalised the National Education and Training Council for the first time in democratic South Africa. I have brought together experts, practitioners and academics to provide research-driven advice to me as the minister. It is a council built not for politics, but for evidence-based decision making in the education sector.
International standards
Their first instructions from me are to look into the assessment policies in our country and whether or not they are fit for purpose and in line with international standards. I have also tasked them with researching ways in which we can lighten the administrative burden on teachers, to free them to focus on their core responsibility of teaching a classroom.
Our reform to strategically reorientate the system to strengthen the foundations of learning is inspiring international momentum. The Ibsa Network for Quality Foundational Learning has been endorsed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi from India, President Lula from Brazil and our own President Cyril Ramaphosa. This shows that our foundational learning agenda is not only national; it is now going global.
The reforms we are putting in place may not yield ribbon-cutting moments. But they will define the next generation’s experience of education. After all, true leadership is planting trees knowing you may never sit to enjoy their shade.
What we have begun in 2024, we have advanced and made irreversible in 2025. The foundations are being rebuilt, brick by brick, classroom by classroom. And because of this, South Africa is on the path to becoming a nation where every child can learn, read, thrive, and lead. DM