South Africa stands at a defining crossroads, writes Ido Lekota
Eight out of ten Grade 4 learners cannot read for meaning. This is not just an education statistic; it is a national emergency that shapes matric outcomes, drives learner dropout, and undermines the country’s developmental ambitions. The crisis begins long before learners reach high school. As Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube recently pointed out during a Frank Dialogue on Education and Skills Development, the root of this crisis lies in weak early learning foundations from birth to nine years.
“If we fail our children during this critical period, we fail them throughout their educational journey,” Gwarube said. “The first nine years of a child’s life set the compass for their future. Quality early learning is not optional; it is the cornerstone of lifelong achievement.”
The solution, she argues, begins with a bold conceptual shift—one that recognises early learning as the bedrock of all future success. “We must fully embed early learning, from birth to five, within the basic education system, and reimagine Grades R to 3 as a powerful launchpad for literacy, numeracy, curiosity, and confidence in learning.”
Gwarube’s remarks underscore a deeper truth: a future-fit education system must prepare children not only academically but holistically. It must develop cognitive agility, adaptability, and resilience to complexity. It must build digital fluency and human skills such as curiosity, imagination, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, perseverance, and self- management. It must also cultivate technical competence and an entrepreneurial mindset. These capabilities are nurtured from birth; they do not suddenly emerge when young people enter the labour market. “Our responsibility is to shape them deliberately and early,” she said.
Outlining how her government is contributing to this future-fit vision, Gwarube told the forum that in the last two years her Ministry had undertaken the most significant reorientation of the basic education system toward foundational learning.
Since 2021, the Department of Basic Education has dramatically expanded access to quality Early Childhood Development (ECD): registrations of ECD programmes are up by more than 200%, and last year the Department exceeded its one-year goal of 10 000 new registrations by approving 13 300 centres; roughly 1.2 million children now attend registered ECD programmes nationwide.
This momentum has been backed by R10 billion in subsidies over three years and a R496 million investment in the Education Outcomes-Based Fund to create 115 000 ECD spaces in KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape and Limpopo. There was also the launch of a March 2026 pilot for ECD nutrition in the Eastern Cape to address early childhood stunting—a critical intervention given that stunting impairs cognitive development and school readiness.
“These are tangible gains—more children are entering school ready to learn, with stronger language, motor and cognitive skills–laying the foundations for better educational and life outcomes,” Gwarube said. “These are not paper achievements. They have real-life impact. We are building strong foundations for strong futures.”
Yet even as the Basic Education Ministry advances its ECD agenda, broader questions about skills development and the future of work loom large. Dialogue participants raised important questions about how to make education future-fit given the country’s current socio-economic challenges, especially in the era of AI.
Unathi Mtya, Chair of the Unisa School of Business Advisory Board, argues that our education system still prepares people for yesterday’s jobs while the nature of work is changing rapidly. Mtya contends that the education system must adapt to a reality in which people are no longer being educated for a stable profession or a predictable career. There is no longer linear progression when it comes to career building. People need skills to prepare them for constant reinvention in work. There is a need to prepare people for shifting careers driven by non-linear leaps and perpetual adaptation.
“What we need is an education for the future that builds human advantage beyond content delivery,” Mtya said. “If machines can pass exams, why teach children to think like machines? The future will reward who they become, not what they know. The key skill is continuous adaptation, not the linear progression our system favours. Work is transforming fast; our traditional education model cannot keep up.”
Mtya also stresses the importance of critical thinking skills in the era of AI—thereby essentially pointing out the folly of the Department of Basic Education’s approach of focusing on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) subjects as a way of improving quality outcomes instead of STEAM (Science, Technology, Arts, Maths) subjects—an approach that recognises the Arts as a source of critical thinking, creativity, and cultural expression.
This critique intersects with calls for decolonisation. For Dr Linda Meyer, Managing Director of the Independent Institute of Education—Rosebank College, any transformation of the current education system must include its decolonisation. She contends that South Africa may have broken with colonialism and apartheid, yet many of the structures that shaped its universities remained in place long after the political transition.
“The Department of Higher Education and Training’s language policy framework still acknowledges the de facto dominance of English as the language of learning and teaching across the system, underscoring how limited the shift has been towards African languages as languages of academic instruction and scholarship,” Meyer said. “This matters all the more in a society where the promises of democracy remain unevenly realised.”
For Meyer, higher education is one of the institutions through which opportunity is widened, status is conferred, and leadership is formed. But it is also one of the clearest places to ask whether democratic South Africa has transformed the deeper terms on which knowledge, belonging, and success are organised. This, for her, confirms that access has widened without the system fully redesigning itself around the linguistic realities of the students it serves.
She believes that meaningful decolonisation will require more than symbolic gestures or revised policy language. That will depend on curriculum reform that treats South African and African realities as intellectually central rather than peripheral. It will require serious investment in African languages as languages of teaching, scholarship, and research, rather than leaving them largely symbolic in policy. It will also demand teaching approaches that allow students to engage more critically and connect theory more meaningfully to lived reality.
According to Meyer, some inroads have been made, although at a lower level, where the Department of Basic Education’s draft History Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement for Grades 4–12 proposes a shift from a dominant Eurocentric lens through which African history has been taught, to a decolonised approach focusing on African realities and history.
Meyer avers that, even though this development sits at school level rather than university level, it reflects the same larger effort to rethink whose histories are centred and how knowledge is organised across the education system.
Meanwhile, University of Free State Chancellor and Professor of Practice at the Johannesburg School of Business, Professor Bonang Mohale, calls for a fundamental reorientation of higher education—from credentialing and abstraction toward inclusion, relevance, productivity and public value.
He argues that universities are still largely oriented around producing graduates for predefined jobs or abstract knowledge, while the real driver of economies is the production of goods and delivery of services. This points to a disconnection between what universities prioritise (credentials, research outputs) and what the economy needs (productive capacity, innovation, value addition).
Mohale implies that higher education has become too focused on conferring degrees and generating theoretical knowledge, at the expense of equipping students with practical, problem-solving skills that can directly contribute to industry and community development. By emphasising that economies are built on production and services, he is calling for a shift toward curricula that foster entrepreneurship, technical competence, and the ability to create value—not just fill existing roles.
The Professor’s view highlights that current systems often force historically excluded students to assimilate into dominant epistemic norms. It advocates for academic inclusion that allows diverse knowledge systems and aspirations to thrive. It also challenges traditional, test-based meritocracy that ignores unequal starting points. Mohale also calls for a social-justice approach that values resilience, community impact and applied innovation as forms of excellence.
Through ideas like “contextual academic freedom” and “public stewardship”, he critiques universities that operate in isolation from the communities and economies they are meant to serve. He urges institutions to align their missions with public good and national development imperatives.
Coming to universities as centres for research, the Professor points out that current funding and evaluation models reward publication counts and international rankings rather than local, translational impact. He calls for incentives that support translational research, partnerships and measurable socio-economic outcomes.
For CHIETA CEO Yershen Pillay, South Africa’s education crisis cannot be reduced to a shortage of skills alone. His point is that South Africa’s problem is not only about qualifications but about the absence of meaningful workplace exposure. Too many young people leave education with certificates yet without the practical experience employers demand, creating a cruel gap between classroom achievement and labour-market readiness. The result is a cycle in which graduates are formally educated but still treated as unemployable because the system has failed to connect learning to work.
A recent University of Cape Town (UCT) research sharpens this critique by showing that black graduates can still be shut out even when they are qualified, because hiring decisions are shaped by bias, familiarity, and exclusionary ideas of merit.
Dr Pali Lehohla’s exposition, on the other hand, goes further by locating the problem in the structure of the economy itself. If business continues to rely on black communities as reservoirs of cheap labour, then education reform alone cannot deliver a future-fit workforce. The deeper challenge is to transform an extractive labour market that reproduces inequality, so that education leads not just to entry-level survival but to dignified, productive participation on fair terms.
Masithuthuke Group CEO Liyanda Handula, calls for more partnerships among the various stakeholders including business, government, institutions of higher learning and civil society organisations to drive the much-needed transformation in the country’s education system. His company blends private-sector skills and recruitment services with a development-oriented foundation aimed at improving opportunities for previously disadvantaged communities.
Handula told the audience at the dialogue how his organisation is driven by the belief in education as an important tool for social justice and its belief in the agency of the communities it serves.
Masithuthuke Holdings delivers learnerships through multiple SETAs and advertises a portfolio of more than 30 qualifications across sectors, runs apprenticeships and work-integrated learnerships aimed at preparing learners for artisan and skilled occupations—explicitly critiquing the current system for being insufficiently practical in producing qualified artisans—and, through its orientation towards adult education and training in disadvantaged communities with a national footprint.
TTI Group CEO Tsholofelo Malamule’s message to the Dialogue is that skills development and transformation must be practical, measurable, and rooted in real opportunity—not just compliance or policy rhetoric. His company’s mission is about building a workforce capable of driving South Africa’s economic advancement, particularly helping uplift youth and unemployed talent. Malamule frames education as a human right, arguing that closing funding and access gaps is a “national responsibility that requires practical delivery, not policy alone”.
Ido Lekota is a media practitioner and an independent socio-political commentator.
The first nine years of a child’s life set the compass for their future