Inside South Africa’s Struggle to Guarantee Quality Early Childhood Care for Millions of Children

South Africa has poured ambition, legislation and billions of rands into early childhood development since the end of apartheid, yet the majority of the country’s youngest children still learn and grow in settings that no government system has ever inspected, supported or even counted. A new qualitative study published in the International Journal of Early Childhood by Hasina Banu Ebrahim of the University of South Africa and Muideen Oladeji Salami of the University of Ibadan examines why the gap between progressive policy and frontline reality persists, and what a genuinely workable quality assurance system might look like. Drawing on the lived experiences of fifteen stakeholders in Gauteng province, the research offers one of the most granular pictures to date of how quality assurance actually functions—or fails to function—at the point where policy meets practice.

The scale of the problem is stark. According to Statistics South Africa data cited in the study, approximately 3.5 million children between birth and age five have no access to any organised early learning programme at all. Of the 2.9 million children who do attend some form of programme, only 800,654 are in registered facilities. The remainder sit in an informal shadow sector: converted homes, church halls and community rooms run largely by underqualified black women in under-subsidised settings. Many of these providers serve female-headed households, which make up 42.1 percent of all South African households and are disproportionately concentrated in rural areas, where economic precarity and weak social support networks compound the risks of poor-quality care. The study frames this not as a failure of intent but as a structural inheritance of apartheid, whose race-based preschool system left deep spatial and financial inequalities that democratic policy has struggled to unwind.

Since 1994, early childhood development has been positioned as a lever for social transformation. Section 28 of the Constitution guarantees children basic nutrition, healthcare and social services, a commitment reinforced by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Education White Paper 5 of 2001 declared the early years the foundation of lifelong learning. The National Integrated Early Childhood Development Policy of 2015 promised intersectoral services from conception to school entry, and the National Curriculum Framework for children from birth to four advocates play-based, holistic and culturally responsive learning. Most recently, the government’s 2024 ECD strategy committed a five-year plan and an injection of ten billion rands into the sector. On paper, South Africa possesses one of the most comprehensive policy architectures for early childhood in the global South. The question the researchers asked is why that architecture so rarely reaches the practitioners it is meant to serve.

To answer it, the authors built a triadic theoretical lens combining three complementary frameworks. Affordance theory, rooted in James Gibson’s ecological psychology and later extended to education by James Greeno, treats the environment as a set of invitations to action: policies, registration procedures and training either enable or block what practitioners can do. Agency theory, drawing on Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory and the temporal account of agency by Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische, captures the purposeful, inventive strategies practitioners deploy despite constraints. Policy implementation theory, grounded in Michael Lipsky’s concept of street-level bureaucracy, explains how frontline discretion—often a coping mechanism born of resource scarcity—ultimately determines what a policy becomes in practice. The authors argue that no single theory can handle the complexity of the policy-practice interface; together, the three lenses reveal systemic invitations, human navigation and translation failures in a single frame.

The study’s methodology was deliberately close to the ground. Fifteen participants in Gauteng, South Africa’s economic heartland, took part: five key informants, including non-profit directors, a former policymaker and a researcher, and ten practitioner-managers recruited through the Ekurhuleni District ECD Forum. The practitioners, eight women and two men with five to ten years of experience, ran centres spanning the full spectrum of registration status, from fully registered to entirely unregistered. Data was generated through online focus groups, individual and paired interviews and short questionnaires, then analysed using an adapted thematic content analysis approach with iterative refinement until saturation was reached. Ethical clearance, informed consent and anonymity protections were maintained throughout.

The findings on affordances are unexpectedly hopeful. Participants valued the comprehensiveness of the policy environment, with key informants describing the policies as well-intentioned and well-focused. They articulated a sophisticated understanding of holistic child development that goes beyond parental expectations of school readiness to encompass nutrition, safety, health and age-appropriate learning—an explicit break from the apartheid-era model of race-based preschool education. Most strikingly, the practitioner-managers positioned themselves as active agents of quality. Every centre raised its own funds in the absence of adequate subsidies. All conducted some form of quality tracking: weekly workshops, quarterly reports on children’s progress, self-assessments asking where the centre stands and whether it is improving, parent suggestion boxes and service ratings, and deliberate outreach to ECD organisations and forums for support. These practitioner-led initiatives, the authors note, represent compensatory agency—quality being sustained from below in the absence of systemic support from above.

Yet six systemic barriers consistently blocked these affordances. The first is fragmented governance: key informants described a sector where every stakeholder arrives with different expectations, where there is no common understanding of what quality assurance even means, and where the system is, in one informant’s words, very uneven and lacking a base. The second is top-down compliance disconnected from reality. Informants complained that quality assurers arrive with tick sheets rather than time spent in real-life settings, that standards are set without informed knowledge of conditions on the ground, and that only a minority of providers could ever meet the requirements, leaving the rest out of compliance through no fault of their own. Consultation with the non-governmental and civil society sectors was characterised as lip service, with documents sent out for rushed comment rather than genuine co-design.

The third and fourth barriers—registration and municipal dysfunction—intersect most painfully for providers. The government’s Bana Pele (Children First) registration drive continues, but participants described red tape between government entities, months-long waits for fire department compliance certificates, building assessments that cut the number of children a centre may enrol and therefore its income, and officials who do not respond to messages while certificates and criminal record checks expire during the delay. One practitioner described spending her own money, meant for improving her centre, on repeated trips to offices that offered no help, adding that she felt exhausted but was driven by passion and the children. Municipalities, which stand closest to frontline delivery, were described as largely dysfunctional, with ECD barely visible in integrated development plans and municipal bylaws that contradict the national conditional registration framework—differences so sharp between provinces that one informant said the system was setting communities up to fail.

The final two barriers compound each other. There is no dedicated training for quality assurance anywhere in the system: practitioners reported never receiving any, relying instead on general ECD workshops and guesswork, which produces a patchy knowledge base in an already under-qualified workforce. Meanwhile, the persistence of school-oriented curricula undermines developmentally appropriate practice for children under four. Several practitioner-managers admitted they were unfamiliar with the National Curriculum Framework and instead applied CAPS, the curriculum policy designed for Grade R to 3, to birth-to-four settings—not out of defiance but because no one had explained the difference or who should use what at which stage. The result is a sector in which the very people responsible for quality are structurally prevented from knowing what it looks like for their age group.

The authors’ response is a call to shift quality assurance from compliance to transformative practice through a district-based, multi-sectoral and equity-focused model, partly mapped in the eThekwini district of KwaZulu-Natal. Under this model, municipalities, together with social compact partners spanning ministries, NGOs, businesses and civil society, would coordinate ECD across health, education and social development, supported by dedicated ECD desks equipped to handle by-law compliance, monitoring and problem resolution. Practitioner agency would be formalised through professional learning communities building on the self-initiated improvements the study documented, while self-assessment, external monitoring and digital reporting would track compliance across every ward. The participants themselves offered parallel demands: genuine consultation that learns from the ground up, start-up grants and infrastructure funding, dedicated quality assurance training, competent and respectful government officials, empowered municipalities with local accountability, and clear pathways of capacitation with rewards for progression. The study acknowledges the model’s initial cost but argues that systemic advancement cannot be achieved through temporary relief at the site level alone. Future research, the authors conclude, should generate evidence on the systems change required and track the reform’s impact on child outcomes longitudinally—because in a society seeking social, economic and epistemic justice, the islands of good practice documented here must become the mainland.

Subject of Research: Quality assurance systems in early childhood development in South Africa

Article Title: Quality Assurance in Early Childhood Development in South Africa: Affordances and Challenges

Article References: Quality Assurance in Early Childhood Development in South Africa: Affordances and Challenges. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13158-026-00543-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13158-026-00543-8

Keywords: early childhood development, quality assurance, South Africa, policy implementation, practitioner agency, affordance theory, registration barriers, municipal governance, informal ECD centres, district-based model, structural inequality, curriculum framework