In 2025, 656,415 learners matriculated with a National Senior Certificate. Yet the latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey records an official unemployment rate of 33.6%, with 8.5 million people unemployed. While these figures cannot tell us where last year’s matric cohort is now, they highlight a fundamental question: what are we doing from the earliest years of schooling to equip young people not only to pass, but to participate meaningfully in the economy?
Supplied image: Ofentse Molefe, Product Lead and Professional Development Facilitator at SPARK Schools
The answer starts much earlier than matric.
The Foundation Phase, from Grade R to Grade 3, is often viewed as the stage where learners master reading, writing, and working with numbers. These skills are critical, but the purpose of the early years is much bigger. This is where the academic, social, and emotional foundations are laid for everything that follows.
A strong Foundation Phase should not simply prepare a child for the next assessment or grade. It should also build the capabilities that enable a learner to become independent, confident, and capable throughout their education and, ultimately, beyond school.
Building skills for life, not just the classroom
Literacy and numeracy remain critical building blocks of educational outcomes across every subject, but learners also need to develop the ability to communicate, collaborate, solve problems, manage emotions, lead, persevere through difficulty, and adapt when circumstances change.
These should not be treated as ‘soft’ extras that can be added once academic skills are in place. They are fundamental to how children engage with education and the world around them.
Best practice in Foundation Phase education recognises the value of nurturing these capabilities alongside the skills that underpin academic success. A structured approach to character development helps learners develop emotional literacy, work with their strengths and weaknesses, understand concepts like fairness and kindness, and develop a sense of agency.
As learners progress through school, the demands placed on them become increasingly complex. A learner who has developed the resilience to persist when something is difficult and the ability to work with different perspectives is better equipped to navigate this complexity.
Knowing where to start
One of the greatest risks in the early years is allowing gaps in understanding to go unnoticed. Because learning is cumulative, a learner who has not mastered a foundational skill can find it ever more difficult to access more advanced concepts.
Here, a personalised learning approach enables educators to understand where each learner is in their development and use this information to determine what comes next, rather than assuming that every learner needs the same intervention at the same time.
In practice, this could mean differentiated instruction, peer collaboration, digital tools, and targeted additional support for both academic work and what Spark Schools calls the ‘Character Quotient’. The important principle is that the intervention responds to the learner, rather than expecting the learner to conform to a one-size-fits-all approach.
Preparing for a changing world
The connection between Foundation Phase education and employment may seem distant when a child is still learning to tie their own shoelaces. But the capabilities valued in the working world – adaptability, resilience, communication, collaboration and critical thinking – are developed progressively, not switched on in Grade 12.
For parents, therefore, the question should go beyond whether a school produces good marks. Does it identify and address gaps early? Does it develop character alongside academic capability? Does it see and support each learner personally?
If we want more young people to progress from school into tertiary or technical and vocational education, employment, or entrepreneurship, the conversation cannot start when they leave school.
It has to start when they enter it.
