Change is hard

In South Africa, we have a few dozen recognised tertiary teacher training institutions. What they teach is often outdated and fragmented, and they desperately need to modernise and harmonise their curricula to better serve the Foundation Phase teachers (and children) of today and tomorrow. But universities and colleges are hard to change, not least because they simply are complex bureaucratic organisations who don’t have the time or the resources – to transform how teachers are trained.

Nevertheless, action is vital, and urgent. This, in 2025, led to Education Reimagined, an initiative of the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust (OMT) to create a nationwide community of practice that will help cultivate visionary, future-focused thinking among South Africa’s education leaders, strengthening how universities prepare South Africa’s newly qualified teachers. Along with early childhood development, one of OMT’s most important focuses is on Foundation Phase teaching, funding innovative initiatives that unlock significant and scalable improvement through new teachers and technology.

Education Reimagined was born from a central question: how can we better support South African universities to prepare Foundation Phase teachers to teach reading, writing and mathematical fundamentals effectively?

The country needs educators who are not only skilled in content and pedagogy, but also motivated, adaptable and equipped with 21st‑century competencies to improve learning outcomes. Education Reimagined’s primary aims are to build university leaders’ confidence to design bold, practical innovations and present compelling, fundable proposals to partners such as OMT.

Key objectives

To deliver this capacity‑building effort, OMT partnered with the University of the Witwatersrand’s distinguished Tayarisha African Centre of Excellence in Digital Governance, at the Wits School of Governance, a leading hub for teaching, research, policy dialogue and public engagement on the opportunities and challenges of digital transformation across Africa.

Education Reimagined was curated with four key objectives in mind:

• To strengthen anticipatory governance and strategic foresight capabilities among education faculty leaders

• To expand the sphere of imagination that fuels innovation within basic education and university contexts

• To enhance the quality, feasibility and fundability of institutional proposals while improving readiness for innovation

• To promote ecosystem-wide thinking in support of teacher education and Foundation Phase transformation

Ten of the teacher education institutions each assigned two senior delegates to Education Reimagined, which was launched in June 2025 after months of discussions and careful planning between OMT and universities, involving 21 education faculty deans and other leaders in Bachelor of Education (B Ed) studies for Foundation Phase teaching from across South Africa.

In the latter half of the year, a series of in-person and online engagements gave these leaders in teacher education the time, space and structure to rethink their approaches, an opportunity they rarely have because of their heavy academic workloads. The universities’ responses were enthusiastic, and their openness to questioning long‑held assumptions has led to exciting, hopeful ideas.

Our participants were presented with provocative ideas, from the likes of Carlos Vargas-Támez, head of the UNESCO Secretariat of the International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030; Manish Jain, co-founder of Shikshantar and the Swaraj Farmversity in Udaipur, India; Craig Wing, a South African-born futurist; Judy Tate, the executive director of Khanyisa Inanda Seminary Community Projects; Hassiena Marriott, the executive director of the Global Teachers Institute; Patrizio Bianchi, a former Italian Minister of Education; and Professor Jacques Attali, a French economist and futurist.

Armed with an OMT-commissioned trends and drivers scanning report, comprehensively analysing South Africa’s basic education system, the Tayarisha Centre used design thinking, foresight tools and methodologies including Future Literacy Laboratories, causal layered analysis, environmental scanning of trends, events and resources, Three Horizons Framework and scenario planning, to name a few, to tease out critical insights.

Funding great ideas

After months of mentoring and support, including a pitching session, OMT has elected to fund three standout proposals out of seven presented:

• Rhodes University is implementing what it calls Seeds of Transformation, addressing fragmentation in Foundation Phase teacher education using a systems‑innovation approach inspired by African collective knowledge traditions. The project will encourage all universities to participate in sourcing innovations, from which 45 case studies will be developed. Insights from these case studies of effective practice will be used to develop a new postgraduate diploma for teacher educators – those who teach our teachers. A guild for B Ed practitioners, non-governmental organisations and innovators will also be created, to share innovative ideas and address curriculum and teaching-method gaps

• The University of Johannesburg (UJ) and Sol Plaatje University are piloting professional practice schools as “living laboratories”, turning ordinary schools into high‑performing teaching and learning hubs, with strong mentor-teachers modelling best practice in teaching and supporting student teachers during their work-integrated learning placements. Building on UJ’s Funda UJabule School (established in 2010), these sites will function like academic hospitals – fully operational schools that also serve as immersive training and research environments for Foundation Phase teacher preparation

• Nelson Mandela University (NMU) is to launch a programme for teachers to access resources and be able to teach in official languages spoken in the Eastern Cape, other than English. At present NMU’s B Ed programme is presented in English, but graduating teachers are often placed in schools where the language of instruction is isiXhosa or Afrikaans; it stands to reason that Foundation Phase education, where it is policy that children up to the age of nine must be taught in their mother tongue, is substantially negatively impacted. This challenge is evident all over South Africa, not merely in the Eastern Cape, where NMU is situated

A fourth significant initiative to emerge from Education Reimagined is the creation of a publication for teachers, by teachers and with teachers; a Practitioner Journal.  This new academic journal, to be produced by a consortium of four universities (University of Johannesburg, North West University, Sol Plaatje University and Nelson Mandela University)  bridges teachers’ classroom experience with cutting‑edge education research. While this journal will not be funded by OMT, it will be a platform for sharing whose momentum and financial backing from the Gauteng Department of Education have been strengthened through its association with the broader Education Reimagined project.

Our universities are abundantly aware of educational trends, and where changes and improvements to ways of teaching teachers are needed. Not least is the need to capacitate lecturers; an OMT-commissioned study last year, for example, revealed that the mathematics proficiency of student teachers is at Grade 5 level – and, alarmingly, they are being taught by lecturers who themselves have glaring mathematics knowledge gaps.

UNESCO research emphasises the importance of universities remaining relevant and creating the conditions for attracting young people to teaching – and retaining them in the profession. In this vein, South Africa is not alone; it is a universal challenge. Linked to this is a lack of funding, and now more than ever, it is a challenge to raise financial support. We all have to do more with less, and Education Reimagined has enabled universities to approach funders.

Sowing the seeds of transformation

At OMT, we hope that the momentum created by Education Reimagined will continue well into the future, incorporating funders as well as teacher training institutions. We’re excited about a meeting scheduled for September this year, where we will hear about the progress, successes and challenges of the three programmes we’re backing, and examine ways to course-correct and strengthen them where necessary.

OMT fervently believes reimagining how and what South Africa’s youngest children are taught is critical. Our world is changing rapidly, especially due to recent technological advancements, and the realities of the average South African classroom are stark. By carving out the space for our educational leaders to explore and think about how we teach our teachers, we have sown the first seeds of a systemic transformation.

This article originally appeared in World University News on 6 August 2026: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20260804112512209