To address the need for interventions targeting social emotional development and mental health of young children in South Africa, the "Mazi Umntanakho" ('know your child') digital tool was co-designed, and piloted with caregivers and 3-5-year-old children involved in home visiting programmes promoting early childhood development. The aim…

The Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1989. The UNCRC sets out specific rights of children. Countries that are signatories to the UNCRC commit themselves to ensuring that the best interests of the child must be a primary consideration in all actions concerning children (Article 3);…

In May 2023, the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 was no longer a public health emergency of international concern. However, this declaration does not remove severe negative impacts COVID-19 had on the education sector. This paper sets an objective to determine the impact of COVID-19 and the responses thereto in school operations…

The growing utilisation of digital technologies in today's complex and fast-changing world has taken the reality of education beyond the physical classroom. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced many educational institutions to make hasty and unprecedented decisions as they switched to the virtual classroom. This study explores teachers'…

Purpose: In recent years, South Africa has continued to experience a high rate of young people who are not in employment, education, or training (NEET). The emergence of the concept 'NEET' affords researchers an opportunity to more closely examine the life situations and experiences of this population sub-group. The purpose of this paper is thus…

Background: The digital world and the concomitant changes in early childhood education have created uncertainty for teachers not knowing how to adjust their pedagogical practices of using digital play to enhance language development. Aim: This study aimed to analyse what teachers understand by digital play and how they use it for language teaching…

This qualitative study explored caregivers' perceptions of factors influencing early childhood development in low-income, urban South African settings, from a social ecological perspective. Individual interviews were conducted with 15 caregivers of 3-5-year-old children; a reflexive thematic analysis approach was adopted. In the family and home…

Background: While there is now considerable evidence in support of a relationship between executive function (EF) and academic success, these findings almost uniformly derive from Western and high-income countries. Yet, recent findings from low- to -middle-income countries have suggested that patterns of EF and academic skills differ in these…

Background: Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) learners have unique needs, and specific pedagogies, therefore, need to be employed to support the acquisition of their essential skills. A great deal of research has been conducted on the use of music-based pedagogies to teach mathematics, life skills, civics and literacy at various levels of…

Education is a major tool for development and equalizer. This somewhat accounts for the quest for education, at various levels, including adults who were unable to attain an education degree earlier in life. Thus, Adult Education and Training (AET) programmes are established in different community centres to promote adult literacy in different…

Textbooks socialise and legitimise cultural norms, and therefore, learners' social worlds should find expression in their textbooks. In the study reported on here we examined how Grade 4 English First Additional Language and life skills textbooks reflected learner diversity in South African schools as manifested in their racial, gender,…

Leadership is one of the critical drivers of educational institutions and has been overwhelmingly researched across countries. However, there is little with regards to early childhood development centers in the scholarship of educational leadership. South Africa has an assortment of early childhood development centers (ECD) ranging from fully…

As online learning modes become more common, this can exacerbate educational inequalities for learners who do not have the ability to utilise these modes effectively. This has been seen in the COVID-19 crisis where there has been a shift to remote and distance learning modalities despite the limited ability for all learners to benefit equitably.…

This paper examines the dominant approach to entrepreneurship education in the South African education system regarding the crisis of youth unemployment. It draws on the case of the public-school sector, in conjunction with the technical vocational education and training (TVET) subsector of the post-school education sector. The comparison of the…

This paper explores the ways learners respond to and express themselves while interacting with cultural artifacts or cultural realia, "beads and beadwork," used to mediate the teaching and learning of life science concepts in a science classroom. South African policies, enacted in the National Curriculum Statement (NCS) and the…