School Foundations: The Role of Initial Teacher Education in South African Primary Schooling
Authors: Nick Taylor with Irene Pampallis
Why are so many South African children leaving the early grades unable to read for meaning or do basic arithmetic? This is one of the country’s most urgent and uncomfortable questions. School Foundations: The Role of Initial Teacher Education in South African Primary Schooling turns the lens away from the classroom and onto the institutions that prepare teachers, offering a thorough investigation of how South Africa selects, trains and equips those who specialise in the foundation and intermediate phases – the years in which literacy and numeracy are meant to take root. It follows the education-to-employment pipeline from the moment a student chooses teaching as a career, through the design of university curricula, to the point at which a newly qualified teacher walks into the classroom.
Weaknesses in initial teacher education do not fall evenly. They compound existing inequality, sending teachers with the thinnest grounding in how to teach reading and number sense into schools that can least afford under-preparedness. This shifts the debate from “are our teachers good enough?” to “good enough for whom and prepared how?” – distinction that goes to the very core of South Africa’s constitutional promise of equal access to quality education.
“School Foundations presents important research on the persistent challenges of teaching and learning literacy and mathematics in South African schools. Written with elegance and clarity, it demonstrates how initial teacher education can – and must – play a more effective role in addressing these urgent concerns. Essential reading for teacher educators, policymakers, researchers and teachers alike, the book offers a compelling analysis of the links between teaching practice, educational outcomes and teacher preparation, while also illuminating practical pathways for disrupting the cycle of underperformance.” – Linda Chisholm, Centre for Education Rights and Transformation, University of Johannesburg
Full title: School Foundations
Subtitle: The Role of Initial Teacher Education in
South African Primary Schooling
Authors: Nick Taylor with Irene Pampallis
Publication: July 2026
ISBN: 978-0-7969-2730-9
Format: 229 x 152 mm
Extent: 200 pp
Price: R320
Teacher Professional Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Advancing Quality and Equitable Education
Editors: Joseph Pesambili and Marcina Singh
Teacher professional development in Africa is too often reduced to a technical fix, a training programme, a donor project or a box ticked. This book reframes that perspective.
Teacher Professional Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Advancing Quality and Equitable Education offers a critical, evidence-based examination of continuing professional development (CPD) across Africa. The volume’s contributed case studies and theoretical chapters reveal how CPD is shaped by structural constraint, fragmented authority and chronic donor dependence, and explore how it is implemented and experienced by professionals and practitioners.
Drawing on diverse African contexts, including conflict-affected and refugee settings, the volume confronts a stubborn reality: the gap between ambitious reform expectations and the institutional conditions in which teachers work. In under-resourced systems, what looks like resistance or failure to adopt global teaching trends is often professional judgment, adaptation and ingenuity.
This book takes teachers seriously. It emphasises their agency, local knowledge and context, and challenges the persistent tendency to frame African teachers as problems to be fixed rather than professionals to be supported.
The argument is clear: CPD is not a stand-alone intervention. It is a political, institutional and ethical project. Getting it right is not a question of technical solutions but of power, equity and what quality teaching and learning actually require.
Full title: Teacher Professional Development in Sub-Saharan Africa
Subtitle: Advancing Quality and Equitable Education
Editors: Joseph Pesambili and Marcina Singh
Publication: September 2026
ISBN: 978-0-7983-0554-9
Format: 234 x 156 mm
Extent: 360 pp
Price: R420
Author contact details: skhan@hsrc.ac.za
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