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Yesterday, 28 June, Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga released the results of the Annual National Assessments (ANA). The only credible figures to emerge from these results, however, are the so-called verification ANA results. Administered by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), the verification process was an objectivity check based on a representative sample of schools nationwide involving the use of an independent assessment methodology.

The HSRC’s verification ANA tells us what the current levels of literacy and numeracy are for a limited selection of schools. They do not, however tell us which schools in the country are struggling. Information about which schools are doing well and which poorly can only be revealed by the overall ANA results, which comprise a count of every learner who was in Grade 3 and Grade 6 in 2010 (the tests were done on Grades 4 and 7 learners at the beginning of the year). There are good reasons to treat the overall ANA results with great caution.

At the release of the ANA results Minister Motshekga said that nearly 6 million learners took the tests (5,842,622, to be exact). We ask the Minister to confirm how many of the learners tested were actually included in the final results. It has come to our attention that not all the schools tested were actually included in the final results. We know that all special and independent schools (except those in the Western Cape) were excluded from the testing. We are aware of some major problems in the reliability of collection and reporting for schools in the North West, Northern Cape, Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces, and a complete meltdown in the Eastern Cape.

We can rely on the verification ANA figures for an analysis of the health of the education system – and it is grim. For Grade 3, the mean literacy score is 35 per cent and that for numeracy, 28 per cent. The equivalent figures for Grade 6 are 28 per cent and 30 per cent, respectively. Seventeen years into our democracy, where we now have a single and near universally accessible system of schools, young children today are in the main functionally illiterate and innumerate. A modern nation participating with confidence and skill in the competitive global economy cannot be built on such results. We need to focus our minds on improving these results.

To identify which schools and grades are failing we must have accurate figures from the overall ANAs. The provincial departments of education need information obtained at school level in order to identify where the interventions are needed. This is why it is so fundamentally critical that Minister Motshekga provides detailed figures on the scale of the testing. The fact is that without robust overall figures, the Department of Basic Education (DBE) cannot with any integrity guide the provinces in the right direction. Analysis is one thing. Calibrated intervention is another.

When all is said and done, can our school system meet the challenges? Minister Motshekga sets the bar on what has to be done high, which is admirable but, given the hard realities, unrealistic. She wants 60 per cent of learners to achieve at a specific acceptable level of performance by 2014. There is no basis for believing (no evidence of better teaching in the classrooms, for example) that this can be achieved. This unjustified optimism is starkest when the discipline is most complex, as in the case of mathematics, where the Minister wants to improve on a figure of 19 per cent of Grade 6 learners in 2009 to reach 60 per cent of Grade 6 learners by 2014. And why 60 per cent, which seems like an arbitrarily chosen figure?

Province by province, the verification ANAs put the Western Cape on average at the top of the pile and Mpumalanga at the bottom. The lesson here is that, where there are better schools, there are better results. Minister Motshekga should use the functioning schools that produce better results as models for rescuing the weaker ones. Western Cape Education Minister, Donald Grant, has given his assurances that we will continue to prioritise our literacy and numeracy strategy to improve learner performances in the province.

It should be noted that in the Western Cape, standardised testing of Grades 3 and 6 has taken place for some time. These tests are administered by an external agency. The WCED has, until now, been alone in testing for Grade 9 and for independent schools. Minister Grant believes that the more sensible testing, the better, and insists on collecting credible numbers that can be reliably used to calibrate interventions at schools.

The Democratic Alliance is of the firm view that a good education is the most empowering investment any government can make to give its citizens opportunities for a better life. We spend an extraordinary amount of money on education. But we fail to populate our schools with excellent teachers who embrace their responsibility as a vocation, and it is this – teacher quality – that should be addressed as a matter of urgency. With the ANAs we spent far too much money for the results that we received. The results tell us that we have a mountain to climb. However, because the overall ANA results are not complete, we do not know where all of the struggling grades at the struggling schools are. Because we do not know where all the struggling schools are, the education authorities in the provinces with incomplete data do not know exactly where to intervene and at what level (if, indeed, they have the capacity to intervene successfully). The irony of this exercise, which the DBE claims is more comprehensive than matric itself, is that the data needed to fix broken schools is lacking for precisely those schools most in need of fixing.