A new draft law seeking to dismantle some of the barriers to quality early learning is the latest in a series of significant reforms disrupting the sector, for the benefit of young children.
These draft law reforms, decades in the making, have been hard-won, sometimes through advocacy and other times through collaboration between the government and its social partners. We should not take them lightly. They are signals that big wheels are turning for our youngest citizens.
We live in a country where more than a million children between the ages of three and five, mostly in low-income communities, do not attend any form of early learning programme. And far too many of the four-year-olds in preschool — almost 60% to be exact — are not developmentally on track to start Grade R.
This tells us that access to early learning, and the quality of services, must be improved to ensure children are ready to learn when they start school.
With this problem in mind, over the past decade, progress towards expanding access to quality early childhood development (ECD) services in South Africa has been steady but largely unseen — laying policy groundwork, building operational systems, testing ways to scale programme delivery and amending restrictive laws.
Recently, there has been an acceleration of action with the government’s budget-backed commitment to prioritise ECD and a new roadmap for the sector that seeks to expand access to a further 1.3 million children excluded from early learning.
Legal reform
The Children’s Amendment Bill, recently approved by Cabinet, provides much-needed legal reform that balances the need to protect children’s health and safety with the recognition that early learning can be provided in informal settings, like a shack or container — a reality in our country.
It’s breakthrough thinking that dismantles the notion that early learning can only happen in a bricks-and-mortar centre. This idea had long shaped the flow of public funds to early learning programmes, and the irony was that the children who would benefit most from early learning were most excluded.
Facilities that did not meet the standards of formal provision were excluded from funding, which meant that the poorest children whose parents could not afford high-quality care were even further disadvantaged. Yet numerous South African studies have shown that it is the quality of the interaction between the practitioner and the child — and not the state of the building — that improves early learning outcomes.
First, the Bill recognises that children can be kept safe and stimulated in a variety of settings. Basic health and safety requirements are non-negotiable, but nice-to-have accoutrements are not needed.
Second, the Bill wants to make it easier for early learning programmes to register with the state, doing away with a cumbersome two-step process.
Third, it designates how the government must support early learning programmes to register and access state subsidies.
The Bill must now go through a parliamentary process before it is enacted into law.
Still, there may be barriers to registration at a local government level if municipalities don’t relax their onerous requirements around zoning, development fees and health and safety compliance, and all local authorities should use this moment to review their approach to ensure that they are facilitating early childhood development.
Structural reform
The Children’s Amendment Bill provides the legislative scaffolding for structural changes in the sector, which are already under way.
Since inception, the state-led Bana Pele Mass Registration Drive has collected data on 14,000 early learning programmes that were previously not on the government’s radar, and through this initiative, the state is now developing ways to support them to achieve full registration status.
For the first time in South African history, interventions such as Bana Pele are backed by real-time data of where programmes are located and the challenges they face. This is possible through a new digital information management system for ECD — known as eCares — designed and built by the Department of Basic Education in collaboration with its social partners.
Registration is a gateway to support and subsidies from the state. But, for decades, registration status has remained out of reach for thousands of programmes in low-resource and rural communities, which are judged by the same standards as those in well-resourced urban centres — and found lacking.
Before Bana Pele, South Africa had about 42,420 early learning programmes serving around 1.6 million children, of which more than 40% were unregistered. Bana Pele aims to change these statistics. And we must find ways to support the children in facilities not yet registered — at least in ensuring access to better nutrition until full registration is achieved.
Funding reform
The timing of these structural and legal reforms is critical, because the National Treasury has expanded the country’s ECD budget for subsidies considerably over the past two years, from about R3.4-billion in 2024/25 to a planned R8.8-billion in 2027/28.
This money must reach the children who need it most. However, it can only reach them through registered early learning programmes that are eligible to receive the per child per day subsidy of R24.
It’s clear that the Children’s Amendment Bill is not a standalone reform — it is part of a broader shift in how ECD is understood and prioritised. For the first time, political will, resources, systems and social partnerships are aligning.
The task now is to maintain this momentum — to ensure that fiscal investment is sustained and that reforms translate into real, measurable change in the lives of children, especially those born into poverty and whose greatest chance of escaping hinges on the strongest start in life. DM
David Harrison is CEO at the DG Murray Trust and Senzo Hlophe is partnerships and impact director at Ilifa Labantwana.
