EARLY LEARNING INTRODUCTION Servaas van der Berg RESEP

EARLY LEARNING: INTRODUCTION Servaas van der Berg RESEP WORKSHOP ON EARLY LEARNING, STELLENBOSCH, 4 JULY

Background • Funding by Allan Gray Orbis Foundation Endowment for 3 years • By Grade 4, only 22% of SA children can read at a Grade 2 level in any language • What explains these very large deficits? • • • Home background before entering school? Home background once in school? Weak education? To answer this, we need measurement of early earning Life trajectory established early; gaps persistent • • International research shows schooling simply reinforces emerging trends and usually widens gaps (Feinstein, 2003) SA study found language delays are stable between Gr R & Gr 3 - education not powerful enough to overcome entrenched problem (Klop, 2005) • Characteristics at age 7 explain much of variation in educational attainment, earnings and employment (Almond & Currie 2010) • Taylor (2011) shows that, by Gr 5, children attending historically disadvantaged schools have already accumulated learning deficits of at least two years of schooling 2

Children ‘on track by grade and quintile in ANA Maths, 2012 700, 000 600, 000 “On track” defined as not over-aged and within one std dev of “norm group” Quintile 5 Quintile 4 Quintile 3 500, 000 Quintile 2 Quintile 1 400, 000 300, 000 200, 000 100, 000 0 Grade 1 Grade 2 Grade 3 Grade 4 Grade 5 Grade 6 Grade 9

On track by grade in ANA Maths 2012, and 2013 Bachelor’s passes relative to size of entering cohort (entering cohort=100%) Note similarity of Gr 9 and Gr 12 – and even of Gr 4 and Gr 12

The odds are stacked against poor children… “a failure of family and school contexts to build on the early cognitive development of bright children from low SES groups … may be a crucial and under-recognised difference between children from disadvantaged and advantaged backgrounds and a key reason for social immobility. ” (Feinstein & Duckworth 2006: i)

Some things we still need to know • How do some (only a few) individuals in very weak schools somehow still perform exceptionally well • and why does it largely remain confined to individuals? • Why do children still progress after falling behind? (Do teachers teach work of lower grades, or do they learn from their peers? ) • What is preventing a smoother language transition (compared to our neighbours, for instance)? • What is the role of non-education factors? To study all this, we need early measurement 6