Win-win — Diepsloot literacy project gives unemployed young people a leg-up as it boosts matric results

Daily Maverick

4 days ago

In this second in a three-part series on the childhood literacy crisis, Anna Cox and Cecilia Russell report on a project that uses jobless young people as reading tutors in Diepsloot. The results speak for themselves.
A literacy project has contributed to ongoing success in the matric results of a no-fee quintile one school in Diepsloot – and the project has found a novel way to combine literacy with the upskilling of unemployed young people.
Diepsloot Combined School, which caters to one of the poorest communities in Johannesburg, has for the past few years ranked among the top township schools, with matric results of 99.2% last year, slightly down from 100% in 2023.
Edu Fun, at the school, started in 2003 and continued its training even during the Covid-19 pandemic, using young people from the local community to help continue the project.
The youngsters, mostly school leavers, are offered a one-year tutorship to teach kids at the school on a one-on-one basis or in smaller groups for the more advanced pupils.
Some have moved from there into a teaching career, resulting in a win-win situation, says Edu Fun coordinator Jenny Taylor.
'Although we have great results and successes, this model is more expensive than other literacy projects, as more funding is needed to pay them stipends for basic living expenses while they tutor and study.'
Upside of using young assistants
'It provides the youth with opportunities, not only to get an interim job but also to get teaching experience. Despite higher costs, the project has proved its worth, with the school in 2023 having celebrated coming second out of all 960 township schools in Gauteng in terms of their matric results,' she says.
Diepsloot is an informal settlement in northern Johannesburg which was started in the 1990s as a transit/resettlement camp for people from Zevenfontein. In 2001, City of Johannesburg authorities moved about 5,000 families from the banks of the Jukskei River in Alexandra to Diepsloot. According to Stats SA, it is now home to at least 138,329 people, of whom just less than a quarter have no income.
It is also home to people speaking every official South African language and many more from other African countries.
More than 2,400 pupils attend Diepsloot Combined School, and unlike many other projects, all Grade 2s and 3s benefit from the literacy lessons, regardless of their level, says Taylor.
Adult volunteers from nearby communities arrive every week to help the tutors.
'Overcrowding, poverty and lack of services pose serious problems in all seven primary schools in the Diepsloot area, many of which have up to 80 children per class. Every week, we manage to teach some 400 children [at Diepsloot Combined].'
Taylor says the concept of using local young people as tutors evolved during Covid-19 when volunteers were not able to teach during lockdown.
'Over that period, we used the youth to help out and it became evident that learners responded well to the young tutors who were regularly working with learners in smaller groups on a one-on-one basis. We were seeing better and better results.'
While the upside is the startlingly good results, the downside is that the organisation needs to spend a lot more time and effort fundraising.
'We have gone from a model that was 100% reliant on volunteers to one that costs a lot more money to make the programme sustainable and to reach more people and to benefit the youth tutors.'
Taylor says it has been found that using tutors trained in a Phono-Graphix reading method, from Read for Africa, has the greatest success and is even helpful in teaching children with learning difficulties.
The advantage of the method is that it doesn't need complex equipment. It can be taught with a whiteboard and marker, says Taylor, as she lifts the board to show exactly how it is done.
Teacher support and training
Edu Fun also runs training courses for teachers from neighbouring schools using the Read for Africa method.
Teacher support and training were highlighted during a conference hosted by the Reading Panel earlier this year – where one of the critical action items identified was helping teachers learn to teach literacy.
Martin Gustafsson, a researcher from Stellenbosch University, highlighted the shortage of specialist foundation-phase teachers graduating from universities and the quality of their training in reading.
'It is difficult to find anyone who would agree unconditionally that our foundation-phase teachers are adequately trained to teach reading to young children, but it is difficult to identify exactly where the problems lie given how little publicly available information there seems to be on the matter.
'Further complicating matters are disagreements, probably resolvable, around what constitutes effective guidance for future foundation-phase teachers,' Gustafsson says.
To overcome class sizes and a diversity of home languages, Edu Fun works with school administrators, teachers and pupils, and teaches reading, comprehension, spelling and writing in smaller group settings.
'We aim to provide learners with individualised attention and customised lessons appropriate to each learner's ability,' says the Edu Fun coordinator.
Teachers, volunteers and young people from other communities meet weekly at the school to learn more about Edu Fun and the Read for Africa programme and then go back into their own communities to try to replicate the programmes.
As a result, about 1,800 children are attending reading lessons weekly in several communities, both rural and in townships, including Diepsloot, Alexandra, Rosettenville, Limpopo, Tshwane and Umdloti in KwaZulu-Natal.
'There are seven primary schools in Diepsloot and in a perfect world we would have trained 10 youths stationed at each of these schools each year. This would mean we would reach more than 400 kids [a week] per school at the seven schools and teach the approximately 3,000 Grade 2 and 3 learners in the whole of Diepsloot to read each year,' Taylor says.
It costs R1,500 a child a year to participate in an Edu Fun programme, which includes the cost of a tutor. One tutor can teach 30 to 40 children to read per year. DM
This feature was produced with the support of the Henry Nxumalo Foundation.
Using young teacher assistants is crucial to positive outcomes
Unemployed young people and student teachers with an aptitude for teaching and an empathy for children could be a literacy superpower.
In all three projects highlighted in this series, young literacy champions drawn from the community were a crucial part of the success story.
The startlingly good results shown at Diepsloot Combined that have been sustained since the Covid-19 lockdowns are a case in point.
A study, Pathways to Learning: Understanding how Funda Wande Teacher Assistants Contribute to Improved Learner Outcomes, outlines the benefits of employing paraprofessionals for literacy and numeracy outcomes.
'In achieving the goal of improved foundational literacy and numeracy outcomes for foundation-phase learners, the well-established effects of the 'triple cocktail' (Fleisch, 2022) of structured teaching materials, teacher training and teacher coaching are augmented by paraprofessionals, resulting in a highly effective 'quadruple cocktail',' Pathways to Learning concluded.
Education researcher Nwabisa Makaluza, who was involved in the Funda Wande project, said the only downside was the cost.
Funda Wande provided training and support for teacher assistants who received a monthly stipend of R4,407, funded through the Youth Employment Service fund.
For other projects such as the Family Literacy Project and Edu Fun where youth teaching assistants were used, the stipend was smaller than this, but the backing received includes ongoing training and support for their further education. DM
This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.