A quality education for all:
Priority actions for governments, donors and civil society

GCE Briefing Paper
May 2002

About the GCE

The Global Campaign for Education is a worldwide alliance of NGOs and trade Unions active in more than 150 countries. Member of the GCE’s elected Board are: Actionaid Alliance, Asia-Pacific Bureau for Adult Education (ASPBAE), Brazilian National Campaign for the Right to Education, Campaign for Popular Education (CAMPE Bangladesh), Education International, Global March Against Child Labour, Oxfam International, South African National NGO Coalition (SANGOCO).

Please send comments on this paper to: Anne Jellema, Advocacy Coordinator (annej@campaignforeducation.org)

GCE-CME, 5bd du Roi Albert II, B-1210 Brussels, Belgium
www.campaignforeducation.org

The majority of children, especially girls, the poor and children from minority communities, gain far less from school than they deserve. Recent studies show that many children in developing countries are leaving school without learning to read, write or do basic sums. This is an injustice and a waste of human potential that must be challenged. Improving the quality of public education is also one of the fundamental actions – along with expanding access and abolishing fees and charges – needed to achieve the 2015 goal of universal completion of primary school.

Quality education is not a mystery. It can be achieved when all teachers are properly trained, supported and paid; when every classroom has enough textbooks, desks and learning materials; when schools provide a safe and welcoming environment; and communities have a say in decision-making. Above all, it can be achieved when governments and civil society build a strong political commitment to the ideal of good public education for everyone, and take specific steps to improve school conditions in the poorest communities and for girls and disadvantaged children.

In order to make progress on these objectives; it is essential that governments bring together all education partners within the planning process to agree which quality interventions are possible and appropriate priorities for a country. Dramatic increases in donor funding for long-term recurrent costs will be essential, as will support for civil society groups to bring their perspectives on appropriate quality interventions into national planning processes. Civil society groups should strive to ensure that the planning process responds to the interests and needs of all groups, particularly the marginalized. NGOs should seek to promote innovation and strengthen capacity within the government system rather than developing parallel solutions. Ideal models of education that are developed in isolation from the government system have rarely succeeded in improving education quality for significant numbers of children in the long term. Finally, significant strengthening of monitoring systems, to better reflect and track the quality of education processes as well as education outcomes, will be needed. The use of primary completion rates, rather than enrolment rates, as the benchmark for EFA progress is recommended as a useful first step.

The majority of children, especially girls, the poor and children from minority communities, gain far less from school than they deserve. The costs of education are disproportionately high for the poorest families; in Nepal; for example, poor households devote 29% of their non-food expenditure to schooling*. Yet, many poor children spend years in school without learning to read, write or do basic sums. Poor quality leads others to drop out early. This is an injustice and a waste of human potential that must be challenged. Improving the quality of public education is also one of the three fundamental steps – along with expanding access and abolishing fees and charges – needed to achieve the 2015 goal of universal completion of primary school.

Many colonial education systems offered a high standard of education to a tiny minority. The challenge facing post-colonial governments has been to transform this elite system into a mass education system, and to maintain standards, all on a very tight budget. But it has often proven easier to get children into schools than to ensure that they actually learn during the time that they spend there. The latter is a task that demands imaginative policy-making, innovative management, substantial investment of technical and financial resources – and above all, a strong political commitment to leveling the playing field for rich and poor, boys and girls, and majority and minority communities.

Poor quality education leads to a waste of time and money through children dropping out and repeating grades. Insufficiencies generate inefficiencies: when schools are starved of resources, not only does quality suffer – so does the capacity of the system to use resources effectively. Investing in a parallel expansion of quality and access achieves considerably more than using the same resources simply to get children into school. But quality itself requires financing: investing in quality will increase the impact of donors’ and governments’ overall education spending. Shortsighted approaches that drive down unit costs at the expense of quality, such as the use of “volunteer” teachers or double – shifting, can in practice increase the waste of resources.

When budgets are cut back so that the main ingredients of effective schools – teachers, books, and school facilities – can no longer be provided, education becomes inefficient (see box 1 above). Failing schools contribute much less than they could and should to increasing productivity, building human capital and decreasing inequality. High drop-out and repetition rates mean high costs, while the benefits of education to society and to individuals are much reduced when effective learning does not take place.

Time is one of the few assets that poor families have. Spending time in school carries considerable opportunity costs, in addition to the direct costs, which are also steep. While abolishing fees and charges for education is crucial to enable poor children to stay in school, it is also essential that education systems can demonstrate to parents and children that their time is not being wasted. Girls in particular suffer from parents’ perception that school is neither useful nor safe for them: the Millennium Goal of achieving gender equity in schools is itself threatened by the failure to improve the quality of education.

Responsiveness to the diverse needs of children, and accountability to parents, communities and taxpayers for education outcomes, must be emphasized across all five dimensions of quality.

There is no uniform recipe for translating these principles into concrete policy measures. Indeed, while it is important for governments to have access to good analysis of what has worked in other countries, this should never be used as a shortcut for the essential process of involving all local stakeholders in developing local solutions to local problems. Well-meaning attempts to use one country’s experience as a “model” for others to follow have often proven disastrous. However, we believe that the following points should be considered in national and local planning processes.

• Improving quality depends on improving children’s experience in school; many of the changes outlined below are preconditions for children to be “ready to participate and learn”.
• Good quality early childhood provision within families and communities can dramatically improve children’s readiness for primary school; it can be particularly effective in preparing the most marginalized groups of children for their first experiences of primary school.
• Children learn faster where they are able to practice their new skills outside school: there is a strong link between adult education for parents, and children’s own learning.

• Safe and protective environments require strategies to root out abuse by teachers and bullying between children, with a particular focus on girls’ security. Employing more women teachers is key to ensuring both girls’ safety and their ability to learn. Risk factors in the environment beyond the school need to be addressed, for example, on children’s journey to school, and as a precondition for promoting learning from spaces outside schools.
• Little learning can occur in class sizes greater than 30 to 40. Beyond this, it becomes impossible for teachers to engage with children as individuals. And large classes encourage gender inequity, with girls finding it even harder to be heard or to access resources such as books.
• Adequate facilities should include improved classroom quality (protection from the weather, and sufficient ventilation and light); the provision of toilets for both girls and boys, and water points, books and other materials.
• Corporal punishment and other harsh or laborious forms of punishment have no place within a protective school environment. Their application is frequently discriminatory. They cause drop-out and are barriers to learning, as are the use of stereotyping and sarcasm in discipline.
• School buildings need to be made accessible for children with disabilities.

• Curriculum and materials need to be more responsive to children’s diverse needs. While overall quality needs professional oversight, there should be sufficient flexibility to use local examples, where possible in local languages, and to respond to local issues and local culture.
• Curriculum reform is particularly important where indigenous people’s own knowledge, skills and values are not be reflected in dominant groups’ views of what should be included in a curriculum.
• However, curriculum reform should not be embarked on lightly; it is a long, costly and difficult process with a long history of failure. As the content of what is taught in schools is an unavoidably political issue, we believe that success is more likely when national education planning includes democratic processes to shape the curriculum.

• Central to children having a good school experience is the relationship between teachers and children. Improving this often requires changes in approaches to teaching, hence more effective teacher training, and ongoing support to teachers beyond in-service training.
• Investing in more and better training and support for teachers, and improving their conditions of employment, is a fundamental prerequisite for improving quality. The employment of untrained “volunteers” in place of trained professionals is not consistent with an effort to provide quality education, and should cease.
• Education cannot be considered quality education if it is meeting only the needs of particular groups of children. Training and disciplinary procedures should orient schools towards becoming responsive to the different needs of all children, and emerging as non-stigmatizing environments in which diversity is celebrated and prejudices are actively challenged.
• The delivery of adequate hours of instruction needs to be enforced in all schools. It is typical for schools in disadvantage rural areas to provide far fewer hours of instruction than the supposed legal norm, while average annual instruction time is far less in developing than in developed countries. Most African children spend as long in the classroom in a year as Western European children do in a term. Any measure that will result in a further cut in effective hours of instruction – such as multi-shift scheduling or multi-grade classrooms – should be considered with extreme caution.
• Greater flexibility in timetabling and scheduling will enable poor children to attend more consistently.
• Children need to be taught in a language they understand. This needs to be balanced by giving them a chance to learn the languages that give greater access to power and work opportunities. Mother-tongue teaching in the early years can often be successful combined with introducing majority or national languages as taught subjects later.
• Teaching must work towards deepening children’s understanding, not just their ability to learn new facts. The ultimate goal is enabling children to think creatively for themselves. Including music, arts, crafts and drama in teaching styles can aid progress towards this.
• Requiring children to pay for extra tuition in order to succeed is a major barrier to equity and needs to be strongly sanctioned, particularly where it amounts to bribery to pass exams, it needs to be rooted out by inspection. Conversely, teachers need to be paid a living wage without this supplementary income.
• The process of testing children must enable them to learn from their results. End exams have little benefit in the early primary years: other assessment methods can be less disruptive.

• If responsiveness to children is central to quality, education systems need to strengthen the ability to solve problems at local level. This implies better training and resourcing for head teachers and local officials, to enable them to take on decentralised roles effectively. Renewing the links between schools and society requires local officials equipped with approaches to support community involvement in school management and accountability.
• It is difficult to improve quality without responding to children’s perspectives on their school experience. Teachers, inspectors and management authorities need to be sensitised to the benefits of this and supported in ways to make it work in practice.

• Quality in the eyes of parents is visible progress: seeing that their children can actually read, write and count. Regular learning assessments, which are seen to be credible and fair, are important.
• A further important outcome is children’s own experience and perception of how far education improves the quality of their lives in the broadest sense. This may reflect a better balance between future opportunities and the relevance of school to their immediate situation.
• Exam results show only one dimension of learning outcomes. A good quality school may have many children facing extreme deprivations who require longer to reach a given level of literacy, but the quality is reflected in considerable learning progress from a low starting point: this is an important outcome, to be monitored.

Support appropriate, good quality early years provision, focusing on particularly disadvantaged groups of young children, who are most vulnerable to making poor progress in their learning and would be most at risk of dropping out of primary school. Priority should be given to enabling key groups of adults – such as parents, pre-schools teachers and child care workers – to provide opportunities for learning through play and, more broadly, responsive environments that will support both girls’ and boys’ healthy all-round development and transition into schools.

Strengthening capacity to make decentralization work. In supporting the strengthening of state capacity to deliver quality education, donors need to move beyond technical support to central Ministry staff, and fund training to equip local government officials to take on the roles outlined in the national priorities above. Responsibility for education quality within decentralizing should go beyond the education sector, facilitating wider public service reform and capacity building across administrative functions.

Strengthen government education systems rather than develop parallel service-delivery approaches. Civil society innovations within the government system can demonstrate approaches that could be extended to benefit all children in a country. For example, some NGO training programmes for government officials, inspectors, head teachers and school committees have led to permanent improvements. But ideal models of education that are developed in isolation from the government system have rarely succeeded in improving education quality for significant numbers of children in the long term.

Even where donors’ and southern governments’ education policies have acknowledged the importance of quality, their progress indicators have generally held them accountable only for improvements in access. This has skewed interventions towards those that increase enrolments often at the expense of quality. And too little attention has focused on inequity in the provision of quality education: even simply publishing data on per capita spending on education in different regions can provide a starting point for challenging inequitable investment in quality.

Literacy and numeracy rates are of course essential outcome indicators. But because they have become a rudimentary basis for inter-country comparisons of quality, too much reliance has been placed on national average figures. A far more important use of all quality indicators is to challenge inequity in quality provision within countries. Hence measurement of these indicators needs to be disaggregated, related to children’s ethnic, linguistic, social and economic background and gender, and analyzed for evidence of improvements over time. Exam results are inadequate and often contain inherent biases: indeed, they frequently skew investment towards privileged urban groups whose results are the easiest to improve.

Ideally, monitoring systems should include the collection of longitudinal data to track how far education is enabling families to escape from poverty – outcomes in terms of real livelihood benefits linked to education. We urge the World Bank to work with UNESCO’s Institute of Statistics (UIS) to develop ways of using existing instruments, such as household poverty studies (e.g. Living Standards Measurement Surveys) and Participatory Poverty Assessments, to glean such data.

Donors, UIS, and the annual EFA monitoring report all need to move away from sole reliance on indicators of educational progress that are easy to measure but distort policy priorities. A useful start would be to replace enrolment rates with primary completion rates as the basis for comparisons between countries: completion rates are more indicative of real learning outcomes. But donors and international agencies also need to support and respond to national efforts to measure detailed progress in both quality outcomes and processes, within national education planning and in implementation.