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This chapter provides a critical look at what COVID-19 meant for the education sector in South Africa. It documents the path of the pandemic in the education space to understand its effects and the short-term responses of the education system. It begins with the premise that the South African educational system is structurally fragile. Its fragility arises out of the injustices of the apartheid system which disadvantaged schools and learners. It argues that the country has made progress in dealing with this legacy but that the drivers of change, such as improved household incomes, improved access to school materials and better nutrition, have come under strain in recent times. Because of COVID-19, the upward social mobility of low-income communities is growing in precarity while inequalities are exacerbated.

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Our argument in this brief contribution is that COVID-19 has brought the experience of education to a crisis with respect to its practices and the theories that inform it. The practice crisis is about the glaring inequalities in peoples' access to education. The theory crisis is about how we learn. Our contention is that our dominant cohort learning approaches fail to address the many differences children bring to the learning task. In response we make two key moves: the first is to restore the centrality of cognition in all processes of teaching and learning, and the second is to situate cognition in its full biopsychosocial complexity. With respect to the first move we begin our discussion of teaching and learning with a focus on cognition and particularly on its executive function component. We provide the explanation of what it is, and with that, we move to our second to show the importance of new learnings about epigenetics that explain the significance of the relationship between the biological and the social to the cognitive process.

It is essential for learners to develop foundational literacy skills, ideally, in the first grade of formal education. These skills are then firmly entrenched and can be expanded in the following grades to form a basis for all future academic studies. Appropriate assessment practices and tools to aid this process can inform the achievement of quality education. Assessment and the curriculum are intertwined concepts in relation to teaching and learning. Through assessment, it can be established if all learners have attained curriculum content, knowledge and proficiencies in a given year. Furthermore, assessment can assist in advising teachers on which specific areas learners are struggling with as well as provide insight for remedial measures. Together, this can offer ways to improve education. In this article, individual oral assessment using the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) tool is discussed based on two recent impact evaluations of teacher interventions. Each intervention conceptualised its own theory of change to improve learner language and literacy development. The interventions also differed in relation to the target language; English as First Additional Language and Setswana as Home Language. Despite these differences, using the EGRA tool in both intervention evaluations allowed for a discussion on its usefulness in South Africa. This was done with regard to suitability, reliability and validity, assistance to educators, amendments and suggestions to overcoming challenges related to practicalities. In conclusion, recommendations for improving education and the development of literacy in South African schools are made.

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