Forty readers a class, if they arrive by January
The Eastern Cape has started ordering Grade 1–3 materials from the new R1.6 billion Foundation Phase catalogue; the Western Cape is holding back. Forty readers a class, if they arrive by January.
81% of South African Grade 4 learners can't read for meaning in any language (PIRLS 2021). The fix the evidence points to isn't glamorous: graded readers in every Foundation Phase classroom, and teachers trained to use them. This week that fix ran into a procurement problem.
GroundUp and The Education Desk reported on 7 October that the Eastern Cape has started ordering Grade 1–3 materials for 2027 from the new R1.6 billion Foundation Phase National Catalogue, while the Western Cape is holding back until the procurement concerns are settled. The catalogue was suspended in May after News24 reported that Lighthouse Publishers, a company registered days after the tender's terms were issued, was set to receive R285 million for about 26% of the approved titles. Ministers approved it on 18 September, subject to "lawful correction", and the legal reports still haven't been released. The Mail & Guardian adds what's at stake on the other side. The catalogue replaces one that is 15 years old, provides 40 readers per class and a core reader for every learner, and should save about R3 billion compared with the previous R4.6 billion catalogue. Provinces now carry the legal risk on every order, and they have about three months to get books into classrooms.
On SA Policy Space this sits under National Reading and Literacy Crisis Response Programme, which is still at "proposed". That page puts the bottleneck where this story does: training teachers at scale and producing materials in every language. It also notes that the 2024 BRRR (Parliament's annual budget review) recommends a dedicated budget line for reading.
Chapter 9 of the textbook makes reading-for-meaning by Grade 3 its first Tier 1 reform. Structured lessons, graded readers and teacher coaching have already worked inside the existing system, in the Early Grade Reading Study and Gauteng's primary reading programme, and the chapter says scale-up needs "political will and sustained funding, not new institutions." This story mostly bears that out, with one caveat: the books still need a clean tender. The Western Cape's route, which expanded its own catalogue with decodable graded readers and open-source materials, shows the Tier 1 move doesn't have to depend on a single national catalogue. The real test comes in January: how many Grade 1 classrooms in the Eastern Cape and elsewhere actually have the readers on the first day of school.