From Barriers to Breakthroughs: The Urgent Call for Localised Action

Posted by Janice Scheckter on 14 January 2026, 09:55 SAST

We face a brutal reality: South Africa’s education system is not just failing many of its children; it is actively warehousing them. When statistics indicate that 81% of Grade 4 learners cannot read for meaning, we are not building a future; we are cementing cycles of poverty and inequality.

The consequences of this crisis are existential. We are producing a "lost generation" utterly unprepared for the demands of the modern economy. We are falling behind not just globally, but continentally, with peers in nations with fewer resources outperforming our children on key metrics. In a hyper-connected world, educational stagnation is economic suicide.

We know the barriers are immense: insufficient resources, crumbling infrastructure, and systemic paralysis. For too long, the response has been to wait for top-down rescue—a rescue that is not coming.

Waiting is no longer an option. We must pivot immediately from obsessing over barriers to engineering localised breakthroughs.

This is a call to action for the only people who can truly turn the tide: those on the ground.

• Principals must shift from managing administration to leading instructional culture, refusing to let systemic dysfunction dictate their school’s atmosphere.

• Teachers must reclaim the classroom as a site of agency, focusing relentlessly on foundational literacy and numeracy, regardless of subject specialization.

• SGBs and PTAs must transition from passive governance to active resourcefulness, mobilizing communities to bridge the gaps that the state leaves open.

We cannot control the national budget or erase the past. But we have absolute authority over what happens within our school gates today. It is time to stop staring at the walls erected by the system and start building doors for our children.