82% of grade 4s can't read for meaning, report shows
Eighty-two percent of South African children in grade 4 cannot read for meaning in any language.
It's an increase of four percent from the time before the Covid-19 pandemic.
The 2030 Reading Panel has released a background report at its 2023 conference.
It says the rise in the figure can be linked to the closure of schools and subsequent rotational timetables during lockdown.
The report says although the pupils may be able to read text, they cannot understand what they are reading.
The panel's Professor Nic Spaull says the pandemic erased a decade of progress, sending us back to 2011.
"Another finding is that if we think of our current trajectory that we are on it would take us 86 years before all children will be able to read because there has been no real progress in reading and we don't have a plan and a budget."
The panel, which was set up after President Cyril Ramaphosa's 2019 State of the Nation Address, said improving reading was in the top five priorities for government.
Spaull says since then there has been no progress.
He says this is what needs to be done to turn the situation around.
"Develop and publish a national reading plan to determine and say what are the budgets that are available to realise that plan because at the moment there is no plan and there is no budget.
"But some of our specific recommendations are that we need to implement a reading test at primary school level because at the moment there is no national reading test that gets implemented."
