This thing called Grade R

In amongst other projects that I as working on I spent a good part of 18 months reading, talking and writing about Grade R. There were two main questions I was asking: Is the SA education system ready to formalise Grade R? How do ECD practitioners (all of us, not only teachers) want to take this forward?

As with most things in ECD there were almost as many issues raised as there were people who participated. I guess that is to be expected from such a crucial sector. But let me focus on just a couple. Here goes.

This thing called Grade R is contentious. Some see Grade R as providing opportunities, such as an opportunity to bridge a divide in the ECD continuum, an opportunity to influence teaching practice in Foundation Phase, and an opportunity to encourage and facilitate collaboration.

Likewise with this thing called the (new) Grade R diploma – is it an opportunity to improve quality of teacher education programmes, to give some existing teachers study opportunities, and again to encourage supported and purposeful collaboration? There is a tension between the current context of Grade R teachers who may not all manage a Level 6 Diploma, and knowing that we need quality teachers, who are well qualified (and appropriately recognised and paid). The Level 6 Diploma was itself apparently conceptualised as a bridge – Whitty Green and Di Parker of the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) have described the diploma as a specific response to the existing context which requires a Level 6 to provide a bridge from Level 5 to Level 7, but the expectation is that in future all ECD teachers wanting to teach Foundation Phase (including Grade R, remember) should move straight to a BEd.

Others see Grade R as causing further divisions, or at least not addressing the challenges of the whole ECD continuum, in other words, the challenges that teachers of 0-4 children face. There is a strong feeling that a new ECD 0-4 qualifications policy will have to address how a person can specialise in 0-4. The Grade R diploma itself, in my view, is not divorced from that issue.

We do know that alone a Grade R Diploma will not solve all the problems. There have to be parallel efforts aimed at increasing the status of ECD teachers through recognition of qualifications, salaries, conditions of service and so on.

We all know that collaboration is the key to putting the ECD continuum into action. Of course collaboration also needs to involve other government departments, other QA bodies such as ETDP SETA working together. In many of the conversations the funders, ETDP SETA and the DHET indicated a willingness to help to build ‘supported and purposeful collaboration’. Let’s hold them to that.

But the most exciting bit about collaboration, for me, is the opportunity for NGOs, FET colleges, and HEIs, in particular, to work together, to share and to learn from each other about how to deliver quality teacher education. Through the EU SPSP programme in the Department of Higher Education and Training, CPUT have been tasked with developing a generic outline for the Grade R Diploma. I am aware that they have already made efforts to make this a collaborative exercise. This is important precisely because of the ‘bridging’ position that children and teachers have in the ECD continuum.

The participants in the Saide discussions identified a number of important issues that we feel will go a long way to ensuring quality ECD teaching and learning. I only want to highlight a couple here. The first is the question ‘What kind of teacher do we want?’. We think that this Framework for Teacher Education Programmes helps us to think about the kind of teachers we want to develop.

Another issue in the ECD sector is the number of approaches that are used by different service providers. We don’t think that everyone needs to use the same approach. We do think that a generic programme should identify universal or standard principles that form the basis for institutions to make individual choices about approaches, whether the choice is Montessori-based, Waldorf-based or whatever.

The question of who our students are, and what kind of support they might need is an important one. The ‘dreaded’ fundamentals have always been a thorn in the side of ECD. If we expect some of our ECD Level 4 and Level 5 teachers to move on to, and cope with, the Grade R Diploma we have to take seriously the issue of whether we are preparing them adequately and supporting them in those studies. Fundamentals (in the sense of basic Language and Mathematics, as well as in the sense of ICTs and academic literacies), is crucial in this support. It is also crucial if we seriously want to foster critical reflective thinking in our teachers, and if we want to take seriously the idea that the content in a quality teacher education programme needs to include facilitating literacy development (and numeracy development) and second-language learning for young children.

The first Saide report tries to address the first question: ‘Is the SA education system ready to formalise Grade R?’. The second report looks at ‘How do ECD practitioners (all of us, not only teachers) want to take this forward?’ Both of them capture a range of peoples’ ideas for implementing quality Grade R. In addition to the two Saide reports, there are numerous other really good research documents, cited in the Saide reports, and other ideas that may not have been captured, which I feel we simply cannot ignore in doing this work.

What this will hopefully lead to is a sense of urgency amongst all the ECD stakeholders to take a good hard look at what we have been doing well for so many years, to see whether there are ways of improving it, changing it. That can’t be a bad thing.