The octopus, the test and the hope

In 2021, ten-year-olds in 57 countries sat a reading test, and one of its stories was about Frieda, an octopus in a German aquarium who learned to open the glass jars her food came in by watching her keepers twist them open. In South Africa, children read it in all eleven of the country’s spoken official languages.¹ The test was PIRLS. Its results for South Africa are bleak, but they are not the whole story: trials in the country’s own classrooms and homes are showing what can help.

What does reading for meaning look like at ten?

The passage shows what the test asks of a child. Frieda, it says, “only opened jars containing her favourite foods, such as crabs and shrimp. She ignored the jars with everyday fish.” Another octopus, Squirt, “learned to paint”.¹ A child who reads for meaning finds those details, puts them together, and notices what they add up to: an octopus can be choosy, and clever about it.

PIRLS sorts children by four benchmarks, at 400, 475, 550 and 625 points. The first, the Low International Benchmark, is the floor. A child who reaches it can retrieve and state details that a text mentions plainly.¹

Reading for meaning by ten is also the country’s own goal. In his State of the Nation Address on 20 June 2019, President Ramaphosa set five goals for the decade, and one was that “every 10 year old will be able to read for meaning”.²

What did PIRLS 2021 find in South Africa?

In PIRLS 2021, 81% of South African Grade 4 learners (80.5%, to be exact) did not reach the Low International Benchmark; in 2016 the figure was 78%. The national average was 288 points, on a scale whose centrepoint is 500, down from 320 in 2016.¹

That was the lowest of the 57 countries that took part. Morocco was next, at 372, and Singapore came top with 587.³ South Africa was the only country from sub-Saharan Africa in the study, so “last in the world” is wrong: most of the continent didn’t take part.¹

Read those numbers with three things in mind. Not reaching the lowest benchmark is not the same as not being able to read: many of these children can decode words, but could not yet show basic understanding of these passages, or, in the usual shorthand, read for meaning.¹ The department itself says South Africa’s Grade 4 results are unreliable, because more than a quarter of learners were at or below guessing: “PIRLS 2021 was too difficult for many Grade 4 learners.”¹ And the top end held steady and edged up: the share reaching the High benchmark went from 1.9% to 3.0%, a change the report still counts as stable.¹

The test also came after two broken school years. In no-fee schools, Grade 2 children lost an estimated 57% to 70% of a year’s reading progress in 2020 alone.⁴ The report is careful to say that “the causal nature of these associations cannot be established beyond doubt”.¹ Fairly put, the pandemic years coincided with the fall, and very likely contributed to it.

One more number matters to parents of boys: South African girls averaged 317 and boys 260, a 57-point gap, the largest of all 57 PIRLS countries.³ The department’s 2025 survey of early reading found it already open in Grade 1, where about 37% of girls and 26% of boys reached the benchmark of 40 letter sounds a minute.⁵ The gap is smallest in the wealthiest schools, which suggests it has more to do with circumstances than with boys’ brains. In one trial, as we’ll see, coaching teachers helped boys catch up some of the way.

Do South African children like reading?

Yes, and more than the international average. Half of South Africa’s Grade 4s said they “very much like reading”, against 42% across the participating countries, and only 11% said they did not like reading, against 18%.³

Within South Africa, liking reading went with higher scores: 312 for the keenest readers, 262 for those who did not like it.³ Which way that runs is an open question. The international report calls attitudes and achievement “a reciprocal rather than a causal relationship”, and children in lower-scoring countries often report more enthusiasm, so comparisons between countries are soft.

And the old idea that South Africa has no reading culture doesn’t survive the data. The 2023 National Reading Survey found that 78% of adults read for enjoyment in some form.⁶ South African children’s appetite for reading is not the problem. The barriers are access and teaching, and on both, the country has evidence worth knowing.

What happens at home before school starts?

PIRLS also asks parents how often, before their child started school, someone at home read books with them, told stories, sang songs, played with alphabet toys, talked about things they had done or read, played word games, wrote letters or words, or read signs and labels aloud. In South Africa, children whose families often did these things averaged 319; children whose families never or almost never did averaged 233.³ Children whose parents very much like reading averaged 342, against 270 for children of parents who don’t.¹

None of that proves the songs raised the scores: homes that do these things differ in income and schooling too. What is worth noticing is the list itself. Almost everything on it is free, and most of it needs no book at all. (What the years from birth to four look like is in our guide to early learning before Grade R.)

More families are reading together: in 2023, 52% of South African adults who live with children said they read with them, up from 35% in 2016.⁶ About three-quarters of them do so at least two or three times a week, and reading with children happens “across class, race and urban-rural divides”. (The 2023 team didn’t have the 2016 questionnaire and had to reconstruct its questions, so the rise is approximate.) The biggest barrier is time: 82% said they would read more if they had more of it.

Books are scarcer. In the same survey, 65% of homes with children under ten had not a single picture book, and only 10% had more than ten, though 87% of adults live in homes with some printed reading matter, most often religious books, newspapers and dictionaries.⁶ And in a national study of four-year-olds at early learning programmes, 36% of caregivers reported never telling the child stories, though most sang and played with them.⁷ That is the cheapest gap to close: a story needs no book and costs nothing.

The same study looked at fathers. Fewer than half of the four-year-olds (49%) had lived with their father in the past six months, and caregivers other than the father reported that 64% of fathers had done no play-based learning activity with their child that week. Children whose fathers had done three or more (15% of them) scored significantly higher than those whose fathers had done none, though the difference was modest.⁷ Where a father lives elsewhere, uncles and grandfathers count too.

Almost everything on it is free, and most of it needs no book at all.

What works in South African classrooms?

Much of the most encouraging evidence comes from proper experiments in ordinary no-fee schools. In the Early Grade Reading Study, the Department of Basic Education tested its ideas in a randomised trial in 230 Setswana-medium schools in North West, from 2015 to 2017.⁸ Teachers in two of its groups got the same daily lesson plans and graded readers. One group was trained centrally; in the other, a specialist reading coach visited each teacher in the classroom every month.

After two years, children whose teachers had a coach were about 40% of a year of learning ahead of children in schools with no programme, a lead twice that of children whose teachers were trained centrally.^{8, 9} Coached teachers were more likely to split the class into small reading groups, so that each child got more practice, and the coaching helped boys catch up some of the way to girls. The impact was larger in township schools; in deep rural schools none could be measured. For a parent, the telling detail is the small groups: a teacher who hears children read in small groups is doing one of the things the coached teachers did more often.

Funda Wande, a South African non-profit that makes reading materials in African languages and trains teachers, tried something else. In a randomised trial in 120 no-fee schools in Limpopo, Grade 1 and 2 classrooms in some schools got Funda Wande’s reading materials; in others, the materials and a trained teaching assistant, recruited from matriculants, working beside the teacher for the year; the rest carried on as usual. By the third term of Grade 2, 18% of children in comparison schools reached the Grade 2 Sepedi reading benchmark; with the materials alone, 30%; with materials and an assistant, 35%. Children with an assistant were ahead in both reading and maths by what the evaluators put at around 1.25 years of ordinary learning.¹⁰

Those results were measured partway through the evaluation, during the pandemic’s disruption. The striking number for a parent is the middle one: good reading materials in the children’s own language helped on their own. It is a classroom result, but a good reason to look for books in your home language at home too.

What works at home?

Some of the best evidence on reading with babies was gathered in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. In a randomised trial published in 2015, carers of babies aged 14 to 16 months who joined eight weekly sessions on sharing picture books, taught in isiXhosa by two women from the local community, reported afterwards that their babies understood and said more words, and the babies’ sustained attention grew markedly.¹¹ A second Khayelitsha trial, with carers of children aged 21 to 28 months, found gains in language and attention too.¹²

The trials have limits: the word counts were the carers’ own reports, the samples were small, and the programme’s developers ran the trials. Across 19 randomised trials worldwide, teaching parents to share books gave children a boost in expressive language that the authors themselves call small, and brief programmes did little.¹⁴ A 2024 trial in the Drakenstein birth cohort in the Western Cape, with children aged three and a half, found no differences four months later.¹⁵ It is one trial, and the 19-trial review found that a child’s age made no difference to the benefit.¹⁴ The direction is still hopeful, and our guide to reading aloud shows how to read this way at every age.

For school-age children, the Early Grade Reading Study’s look at families gives the plainest advice of all. The family habits that went with stronger early reading were “low-tech” ones, as the department puts it: reading to a child regularly, and knowing what the child was doing at school, down to checking the school bag and knowing their reading level. Its summary: “showing up and showing an interest in a child’s reading practices show the greatest promise.”⁹ That part comes from a study of families, outside the trial itself, and it costs nothing to follow.

Who is helping families read?

Parents in South Africa have good allies. Nal’ibali, the national reading-for-enjoyment campaign for children aged 0 to 12, takes its name from isiXhosa for “here’s the story”, and sets out to inspire children “to love reading stories in all South African languages”.¹⁶ The Nal’ibali Trust also published the 2023 National Reading Survey quoted above.

Book Dash, a Cape Town non-profit, gathers volunteers to make open-licensed picture books in 12-hour events, and by its own count had distributed more than 6.6 million books by 2025/26. Its mission is that “every child should own a hundred books by the age of five”.¹⁷ No study stands behind the number; it is an aspiration, and a fine one.

A personalised book, the kind we make, is one way to put a book in a home. Most families will rely on library books, free books and stories told aloud, and the evidence on this page is about reading together, whatever the book. (What research does say about stories that star the child is in the science of starring.)

What can a family do?

• A few minutes, most days. Book-sharing programmes typically asked families for 5 to 15 minutes a day, and the Khayelitsha carers for at least 10. No study has yet tested the ideal length.^{13, 11}
• Tell stories without a book. In the car, in a queue, with the lights out.
• Use your home language. The national survey found that children tested in African languages brought relatively strong vocabulary in their home language, and the department calls the home language “an important resource”.⁵ Our piece on raising readers in more than one language has the evidence.
• Practise the sounds. The Grade 1 benchmark is 40 letter sounds a minute, the same in every language, and fluent readers understood far more: of the Grade 3 and 4 learners who read fluently enough to meet their benchmark, 66% scored above half on a written comprehension test, against 2% of those who could not yet read.⁵ Our guide to first sounds and phonics has games for it.
• Share the reading round. Dads, uncles, older brothers and sisters, and Gogo, Ouma or Oupa. (If a grandparent would like to give a book too, our page on gifts from grandparents and godparents has ideas.)

Frieda learned to open her jars by watching her keepers do it first. Reading at home asks for something similar: a few minutes, most days, with someone who shows the way.

Sources

1. Department of Basic Education (2023). PIRLS 2021: South African Main Report (K. Roux, S. van Staden & M. Tshele, Centre for Evaluation and Assessment, University of Pretoria). Pretoria: DBE. Executive summary, and printed pp. 23–33, 60–62 and 73–75. hdl.handle.net/2263/93145
2. The Presidency (2019). State of the Nation Address, 20 June 2019. SAnews. sanews.gov.za
3. Mullis, I. V. S., von Davier, M., Foy, P., Fishbein, B., Reynolds, K. A., & Wry, E. (2023). PIRLS 2021 International Results in Reading. Boston College, TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center. Exhibits 1.2, 1.5, 5.2 and 7.1, and pp. 114–115. doi.org/10.6017/lse.tpisc.tr2103.kb5342
4. Ardington, C., Wills, G., & Kotze, J. (2021). COVID-19 learning losses: Early grade reading in South Africa. International Journal of Educational Development, 86, 102480. doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2021.102480
5. Department of Basic Education (2025). Funda Uphumelele National Survey: Summary Report, and Policy Summary. Pretoria: DBE. Summary Report (PDF); Policy Summary (PDF)
6. Polzer-Ngwato, T., Shilakoe, L., Morse, K., & Huston, K. (2023). National Reading Survey 2023 Findings Report. Nal’ibali Trust (National Reading Barometer). Books at home and reading with children: Executive summary, pp. 7–8. lhg.cput.ac.za
7. Giese, S., Pettersson Gelander, G., Cook, C., Carnegie, T., Tredoux, C., Dawes, A., Biersteker, L., Beukes, S., Pahla, Z., & Kika-Mistry, J. (2025). Thrive by Five Index 2024: National Findings. Cape Town: DataDrive2030 (survey led by the Department of Basic Education), pp. 72–76. thrivebyfive.co.za (PDF)
8. Cilliers, J., Fleisch, B., Prinsloo, C., & Taylor, S. (2020). How to improve teaching practice? An experimental comparison of centralized training and in-classroom coaching. Journal of Human Resources, 55(3), 926–962. doi.org/10.3368/jhr.55.3.0618-9538R1
9. Department of Basic Education. Early Grade Reading Study (programme page, with the evaluation and family influences findings). education.gov.za
10. Ardington, C. (2023). Funda Wande Limpopo Evaluation: Second Midline Report. SALDRU, University of Cape Town. fundawande.org (PDF)
11. Vally, Z., Murray, L., Tomlinson, M., & Cooper, P. J. (2015). The impact of dialogic book-sharing training on infant language and attention: A randomized controlled trial in a deprived South African community. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 56(8), 865–873. doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.12352
12. Dowdall, N., Murray, L., Skeen, S., Marlow, M., De Pascalis, L., Gardner, F., Tomlinson, M., & Cooper, P. J. (2021). Book-sharing for parenting and child development in South Africa: A randomized controlled trial. Child Development, 92(6), 2252–2267. doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13619
13. Pillinger, C., & Vardy, E. J. (2022). The story so far: A systematic review of the dialogic reading literature. Journal of Research in Reading, 45(4), 533–548. doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12407
14. Dowdall, N., Melendez-Torres, G. J., Murray, L., Gardner, F., Hartford, L., & Cooper, P. J. (2020). Shared picture book reading interventions for child language development: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Child Development, 91(2), e383–e399. doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13225
15. Koopowitz, S. M., Maré, K. T., Lake, M., du Plooy, C., Hoffman, N., Donald, K. A., Malcolm-Smith, S., Murray, L., Zar, H. J., Cooper, P., & Stein, D. J. (2024). Efficacy of a dialogic book-sharing intervention in a South African birth cohort: A randomized controlled trial. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 128, 152436. doi.org/10.1016/j.comppsych.2023.152436
16. Nal’ibali. About us. nalibali.org/about-us
17. Book Dash. bookdash.org