Quality matters in education

The second of the six goals of the Dakar Framework for Action agreed in 2000 commits nations to the provision of ‘good quality’ primary education. Goal 6 further recommends attention to improving all aspects of the quality of education. In many countries striving to guarantee children the right to education, the focus on access often happens at the expense of quality.

Policy-makers must recognise that quality stands at the heart of Education for All (EFA): it determines the extent to which pupils acquire cognitive skills (thought processing) and a wider set of personal and social skills essential for development.

The third edition of the EFA Global Monitoring Report, “Education for All: The Quality Imperative”, monitors progress towards the six Dakar goals and offers a map for understanding, monitoring and improving quality. With regards to progress towards the goals, the report finds that:

• Access to early childhood education, a strong influence on future school performance and girls’ enrolment at primary level remain low: a child in sub-Saharan Africa can expect only 0.3 years of pre-primary schooling, compared to 2.3 years in North America and Western Europe.
• The pace of enrolling more children into school has increased but remains too slow to achieve universal primary education by 2015. On current trends, the world net enrolment ratio will be about 87% in 2015.
• Completion of primary schooling remains a major concern as survival rates to grade 5 are below 75 percent in 30 of 91 countries for which data are available and grade repetition is frequent.
• Efforts to raise the level of skills among youths and adults have not been demonstrably successful in the few developing countries that have conducted evaluations on programmes.
• 800 million adults – two thirds of them women – remain illiterate: 70 percent are concentrated in 9 countries.
• Although many countries have made significant progress towards gender equity at primary levels, large gaps remain, particularly in north Africa and the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and south and west Asia: fewer than a fifth of developing countries with reliable data have achieved gender parity at secondary level.

Indicators of quality give reason for concern. In many countries pupil to teacher ratios are high, teachers do not meet the minimum standards for entry into teaching, students do not spend enough time in the classroom, the HIV/AIDS pandemic is undermining the provision of good education and public spending on education is insufficient. National and international test scores show that low achievement is widespread in most developing regions.

Although the right to education has been reaffirmed on many occasions since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, many international organisations are silent about the qualitative dimension of learning. A single-minded focus on the quantitative aspects of education remains - as recently as 2000, the United Nations’ Millennium Declaration omitted reference to quality in its commitment to achieve universal primary education by 2015.

Education for all cannot be achieved without improving quality. In many parts of the world, an enormous gap persists between the numbers of students graduating from school and those who master a minimum set of cognitive skills. Any policy aimed at pushing enrolments towards a hundred percent must also ensure good quality learning conditions.

The 2005 Report argues that quality can be improved through:

• better conditions of service for teachers and better training, with an emphasis on school-based pre-service training and ongoing professional support
• sufficient instructional time and priority to reading as a priority area in efforts to improve the quality of basic education
• gender-sensitive policies in education – especially employing more female teachers and ensuring that schools are safe and have proper sanitation facilities
• instruction in the learner’s first language in the first years of schooling–this has been shown to improve learning outcomes and reduce grade repetition and dropout rates
• better textbook provision, reduction of class sizes and child-friendly remedial education
• stronger links among government departments responsible for early childhood care and education, literacy and health
• higher national spending on basic education.

Source(s):
'EFA Global Monitoring Report 2005', UNESCO
Chapter 1 of 'EFA Global Monitoring Report 2005', UNESCO Full document.

Funded by: UNESCO and several bilateral donors

id21 Research Highlight: 25 May 2005

Further Information:
The Director
EFA Global Monitoring Report Team
c/o UNESCO, 7 place de Fontenoy
75352 Paris 07
France

Tel: +33 1 45 68 21 28
Fax: +33 1 45 68 56 27
Contact the contributor: efareport@unesco.org

EFA Monitoring Report Team, UNESCO

Other related links:
'Two years after Dakar: on the road to EFA?'

'Going into a decline? Assessing global aid flows to education'

'Does primary teacher education pass muster?'

'Meeting education development goals: simply a question of money?'

'UPE at all costs: Ugandan children flock to school, but quality suffers'