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South Africa’s education challenges begin in the earliest years of life. Strengthening ECD, investing in practitioners, and adopting trauma-informed, developmental approaches are essential to disrupting inequality and rebuilding the schooling system.
By PROFESSOR SIGAMONEY MANICKA NAICKER
South Africa’s education system stands at a crossroads. Despite decades of reform, renewed strategies, and repeated interventions, the pattern remains painfully familiar: literacy levels continue to decline, numeracy remains weak, behavioural challenges intensify, and the gulf between children in affluent suburbs and those in working-class and impoverished communities widens each year.
While many conclude that schooling itself is broken, this is only partially true. What is fundamentally broken is the developmental foundation upon which schooling is expected to rest. The crises visible in Grade 4, Grade 9 or matric do not suddenly emerge at those points; they are the final expression of inequities, developmental delays, trauma, hunger, and unstable caregiving that begin long before a child enters a Grade R classroom.
To meaningfully reimagine education reform, we must shift our gaze from the later years of schooling—where the symptoms of failure become visible—to the earliest years of life, where the roots of inequality take hold. The first five years of life are a period of extraordinary neural plasticity, rapid growth, and cognitive, emotional, and social formation. These early years offer the most powerful opportunity for stimulating language development, strengthening executive functioning, and building resilience, belonging, and emotional security. Yet this is also the period most neglected in national planning, least resourced in provincial budgets, and often misunderstood in policy discourse.
Government planning documents frequently articulate the importance of Early Childhood Development (ECD), and the Western Cape Education Department’s 2025–2030 Strategic Plan identifies ECD as a central lever for disrupting intergenerational poverty. But rhetorical commitments are not the same as systemic investment. Only a small fraction of the education budget is allocated to ECD, while the bulk continues to flow to the middle and upper years of schooling, where damage has already been done and remediation is costlier and less effective. This contradiction reflects a profound misunderstanding: the system continues to treat early childhood as peripheral rather than foundational.
This misunderstanding is reflected in the province’s newly announced Early Learning Measures for 2026, which introduce a testing regime aimed at evaluating readiness, early numeracy, and language abilities in young children. On the surface, early testing appears proactive. However, formal testing presumes that young children have been exposed to stable homes, rich language environments, consistent caregiving, and developmental stimulation. It assumes children arrive at ECD centres with roughly comparable experiences. The lived realities of South Africa’s working-class and impoverished communities, however, differ dramatically from these assumptions.
Testing cannot reveal the emotional exhaustion of a child who spent the night listening to gunfire, nor can it diagnose the developmental impact of chronic hunger or inconsistent caregiving. It cannot identify untreated hearing impairments, assess the effects of overcrowded living conditions, or interpret behaviours—aggression, withdrawal, restlessness—that often signal trauma rather than inability. In such a context, testing becomes an instrument of misrecognition: it measures performance without understanding experience, labels children according to deficits they did not create, and obscures the structural conditions shaping their development.
A testing-driven model also reflects a deeper policy illusion: that outcomes can be improved simply by measuring them more frequently, rather than strengthening the developmental foundations that make learning possible. Early childhood development is not a miniature version of schooling. It is a different developmental landscape altogether—one in which emotional security, attachment, sensory exploration, relational warmth, and play form the basis of cognitive growth. When these conditions are not met, testing merely quantifies disadvantage.
What the system needs is not early testing but early screening—a practice rooted in care rather than judgement. Developmental screening does not rank children or compare them to norms derived from privileged contexts. Instead, it enables practitioners to identify early signs of developmental risk: delayed speech, hearing or vision challenges, sensory sensitivities, emotional dysregulation, nutritional concerns, or trauma-related behaviours. Crucially, screening identifies these needs at a time when the brain is most receptive to intervention. When vulnerabilities are detected early, simple strategies—referral pathways, caregiver support, enriched language exposure, sensory regulation activities, or emotionally responsive caregiving—can prevent these vulnerabilities from becoming entrenched barriers.
Screening aligns naturally with the principles of inclusive education, which view diversity as an expected part of human development rather than a deviation from the norm. By intervening early, the system reduces unnecessary referrals to special schools, strengthens developmental trajectories, promotes emotional security, and reduces the burden on Foundation Phase teachers, who too often inherit children whose learning difficulties could have been addressed years earlier.
For screening to succeed, however, practitioners must be adequately trained, supported, and empowered. This highlights one of the most urgent gaps in South Africa’s education landscape: the retraining of ECD practitioners.
Many ECD practitioners work in under-resourced facilities, often with limited formal training and minimal opportunities for professional development. Yet they spend the most time with young children during this critical developmental period. They observe children’s behaviours, navigate emotional needs, and mediate the impact of trauma and poverty. Many practitioners express frustration that their initial training did not prepare them for the realities they face: large classes, limited resources, children who arrive hungry or dysregulated, and families overwhelmed by unemployment, violence, or caregiver stress.
Retraining is essential because the demands of the field have changed. Traditional training models—rooted in developmental theories from affluent contexts—are inadequate for communities shaped by hunger, violence, overcrowding, and instability. Practitioners need training that reflects the South African context: trauma-informed approaches, developmental screening skills, strategies for strengthening language and numeracy readiness, relational pedagogy, and the principles of educare. They need to understand the neuroscience of early adversity, the effects of chronic stress on learning, the signs of sensory processing difficulties, and how to establish routines that foster emotional security.
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Retraining must also recognise practitioners’ existing strengths. Many already use powerful informal practices: storytelling that soothes anxious children, rhythmic games that build numeracy, gentle routines that provide emotional structure, and creative use of everyday objects when resources are scarce. Retraining should validate this local knowledge and integrate it into a professional framework—transforming intuition into intentional practice and acknowledging practitioners as contributors to early childhood pedagogy.
Without comprehensive retraining, the system cannot achieve developmental justice. Practitioners are the frontline agents of cognitive, emotional, and social development. They are often the first adults to recognise trauma or developmental delays. Investing in their professional growth is not optional; it is central to building an inclusive education system capable of disrupting intergenerational inequality.
The need for a new ECD paradigm becomes even clearer when we consider the developmental landscape of working-class communities. Childhood in such contexts is frequently shaped by instability, overcrowding, inconsistent caregiving, limited early language exposure, and exposure to violence. Caregivers may be overwhelmed by unemployment, depression, illness, or chronic stress. Under these conditions, children’s brains adapt for survival rather than learning. Their stress response systems become overactivated, impairing memory, focus, and emotional regulation. When they enter formal schooling without secure attachment, foundational vocabulary, or sensory and motor readiness, they are quickly labelled as ‘slow’ or ‘not ready’, when in reality they are carrying the imprint of systemic neglect.
This reality underscores the importance of educare—a philosophical approach that recognises care and education as inseparable. Educare is not merely the provision of meals, safety, or supervision; it is a relational model in which belonging, love, predictability, and emotional connection form the basis for learning. Children cannot learn if they do not feel safe. They cannot explore if they are dysregulated. They cannot develop language without meaningful interaction. Educare positions the emotional life of the child at the centre of pedagogy and redefines ECD as a holistic, dignity-based endeavour.
Despite clear developmental evidence supporting educare, South Africa’s schooling pipeline continues to treat the emotional lives of children as peripheral. Behavioural difficulties are treated as disciplinary issues rather than developmental signals. Teachers receive minimal training in neurodevelopment, trauma, or relational pedagogy. ECD practitioners are undervalued and often excluded from policy discussions. As a result, by Grade 3 many children cannot read for meaning; by Grade 4 they begin to disengage; by Grade 9 many drop out; and by 18 they join the growing NEET population. The tragedy is not merely academic failure but the loss of human potential and the perpetuation of cycles of poverty and violence.
To rebuild the education system, we must rebuild childhood. This requires investing where returns are highest: in emotional security, early language exposure, trauma-informed practice, developmental screening, educare, and the professional growth of practitioners. Early childhood is not a convenience; it is a constitutional and developmental imperative.
A further dimension essential to practitioner and Foundation Phase training is the development of a Pedagogy of Resilience—a response rooted not in romanticised notions of childhood but in the lived realities of working-class environments. As Paul Willis noted in Learning to Labour, working-class children do not arrive at school as blank slates; they arrive with cultural logics, survival strategies, humour, identity practices, and forms of resistance shaped by their environments. These strategies may appear to teachers as disengagement or defiance, yet they are rational adaptations to marginalisation.
A Pedagogy of Resilience does not seek to erase these characteristics. Instead, it reinterprets them as resources for belonging, agency, and persistence. It requires practitioners to move from reacting to behaviour to understanding the meaning behind it. A child who challenges authority may demonstrate leadership potential; a withdrawn child may be exercising self-protection; a humorous child may be using social intelligence to navigate insecurity.
Such a pedagogy strengthens traits that support learning and life—self-control, initiative, empathy, perseverance, and confidence. It discourages the internalisation of anti-school values produced by marginalisation and offers alternative cultural scripts rooted in dignity, possibility, and hope. In a society where inequality constantly threatens children’s education, a Pedagogy of Resilience is a profound act of social justice: it equips children not only to survive their context but to transcend it.
Professor Sigamoney Manicka Naicker is Extra-Ordinary Professor at the University of the Western Cape; Visiting Professor at Leeds Trinity University; Research Fellow at the University of South Africa; and a member of the Rotary Club of World Disability Advocacy.
