Quote from the address by the Minister of Education, Naledi Pandor MP, at the Foundation Phase Conference.

This is a four-year campaign to create a national focus to improve reading, writing and numeracy abilities of all South African children.

Through the campaign, we hope to ensure that by 2011, all learners are able to demonstrate age-appropriate competence levels in literacy and numeracy. For instance, a specific target would be to ensure that by 2011, no learner performs at a level of less than 50% in the standardized grade 3 literacy and numeracy survey I referred to earlier.

To achieve this, the Foundations for Learning campaign has established the following “non-negotiables” as issues that it will address:

• First, every classroom must have the appropriate resources for effective teaching . A list of basic resources is contained in the government gazette on this campaign published on 14 March 2008. Each school must ensure that every teacher has at least the basic minimum resources in the classroom.

• Second, teachers must plan and conduct effective teaching . All teachers are expected to be in their classes teaching planned lessons during contact teaching time. The timetable must ensure that every learner in the primary school engages in reading at school for 30 minutes every day, writes a piece of extended writing appropriate to the grade, engages in mental maths for 10 minutes and written maths for 20 minutes every day.

• Third, District Teacher Forums will be established in all districts and teachers are expected to be a member of the district forum, or of a school forum, so that ideas, experience and best practice is shared and teachers can enhance their teaching strategies.

• Fourth, teachers must assess learner performance regularly. Standardized assessments will be provided by the Department of Education and the results of these assessments must be reported to the district office from where the results for each school will be sent, via the provincial office, to my office.

• To assist teachers to manage the assessment tasks within the continuous assessment framework, my Department has provided milestones for expected attainment in Numeracy and Literacy per term per grade. Annual tests based on the quarterly assessments will be provided to all schools.