The crisis in South African education is now well documented. There is a growing recognition that South African schoolchildren are stumbling at the very first hurdle - they are failing to learn to read in both their home language and in English as a second language during the formative schooling years from Grades 1 to 3.

Although cross-national studies like the Progress in International Literacy Study (PIRLS) and our own Annual National Assessment (ANA) consistently show that less than half of children are fluent readers at the end of the Foundation Phase, less is known about the kinds of effective interventions we need to put in place to address this massive challenge.

Many initiatives, both government and private sector, have been undertaken over the past three decades around early reading in particular, but few appear to have improved reading at scale or to have been sustainable. This book revisits and updates the current trends in early-grade learning and presents ground-breaking research undertaken in South Africa that shows how the problem can be fixed.

Although a number of informative books on the challenges of South African education have been published in the past decade, there is no text that analyses the scientific evidence on which to build a system-wide turnaround strategy. The aim of this book is to offer policy and academic communities, as well as the wider public, an opportunity to engage with cutting-edge approaches to system-wide instruction reform and with the scientific evidence from fieldwork.