The Essential Guide to Quality in Indian Education

Education must fully assume its central role in helping people to forge more just, peaceful and tolerant societies.
— Ban Ki-moon, Former Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN)

After 3 years of tough negotiation in 2015, 193 countries agreed to a common set of universal goals that each UN member will use to frame their agendas and political policies over the next 15 years called the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Goal 4 of the SDGs was a unique goal focused purely on education. This is the first time such a standalone education goal has been set and ratified. And it is a big deal for many reasons.

Source: United Nations

For the first time, the world has agreed that quantity (access) in education is not enough. The kind of education provided matters equally, if not more. It also has a different, more nuanced implication ie. A quality education is not one that is measured purely by a test score or by how many words per minute a 5-year-old can read. To focus on these metrics alone is a disservice to the student, the family, and the broader human race.

Understanding Education Quality

Quality can be regarded from different perspectives. For many students quality is a fair system where their skills are awarded and where their achievements are acknowledged. For example, a Scottish student in 2nd standard thought that a good teacher “is very clever, doesn’t shout, helps you every day, is not bossy, has faith in you, is funny, is patient, is good at work, tells you clearly what to do, helps you with mistakes, marks your work, helps you to read, helps you with spelling and has got courage.” (MacBeath et al., 1996, p. 55) For parents, quality means a school where the students are safe and where they can learn in a stimulating environment. For many teachers, quality is a school where the students want to learn and where the working conditions are good — Ulf Fredriksson

There are various approaches to understanding ‘quality’ in education. For the purpose of this article, we have focused on 3 complementary definitions.

ASCD and Education International (EI)

Two leading education organizations that represent over 30 million educators globally — ASCD, based in the Washington, DC, USA and Education International (EI), based in Brussels, Belgium have defined quality education as follows:

“A quality education is one that focuses on the whole child — the social, emotional, mental, physical, and cognitive development of each student regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or geographic location. It prepares the child for life, not just for testing.

A quality education provides resources and directs policy to ensure that each child enters school healthy and learns about and practices a healthy lifestyle; learns in an environment that is physically and emotionally safe for students and adults; is actively engaged in learning and is connected to the school and broader community; has access to personalized learning and is supported by qualified, caring adults; and is challenged academically and prepared for success in college or further study and for employment and participation in a global environment.

A quality education provides the outcomes needed for individuals, communities, and societies to prosper. It allows schools to align and integrate fully with their communities and access a range of services across sectors designed to support the educational development of their students.

A quality education is supported by three key pillars: ensuring access to quality teachers; providing use of quality learning tools and professional development; and the establishment of safe and supportive quality learning environments.

The statement also describes the current state of education in the world and calls on educators to promote a whole child approach to education:

The SDGs reflect a global consensus in our young century that education is a human right and a public good that is critical to the health and future of the world. But ours is a world of severe challenges, with millions of students under fire, unsettled and unschooled due to conflict and governments globally failing to meet their funding commitments to education, especially with regard to their poorest citizens. Education advocates have a responsibility to promote policies that integrate schools, communities, and nations into a system that supports development of the whole child, ensuring that each student is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged.”

This fact that this interpretation of education quality is emanating from the teachers themselves gives it more weight.

UNICEF

A paper presented by UNICEF at the meeting of The International Working Group on Education at Florence, Italy stated that quality education includes 5 major aspects:
1. Learners who are healthy, well-nourished and ready to participate and learn, and supported in learning by their families and communities. This can be further sub-divided into following areas:
- A. Good health and nutrition
- B. Early childhood psychosocial development experiences
- C. Regular attendance for learning
- D. Family support for learning

2. Environments that are healthy, safe, protective and gender-sensitive, and provide adequate resources and facilities. This can be further sub-divided into following areas:
- A. Physical elements: Quality of school facilities, interaction between school infrastructure and other quality dimensions, and class size
- B. Psychosocial elements: Peaceful and safe environments (especially for girls), teachers’ behaviours that affect safety, effective school discipline policies, inclusive environments, and non-violence
- C. Service Delivery: Provision of health services

3. Content that is reflected in relevant curricula and materials for the acquisition of basic skills, especially in the areas of literacy, numeracy and skills for life, and knowledge in such areas as gender, health, nutrition, HIV/AIDS prevention and peace. This can be further sub-divided into following areas:
- A. Student-centred, non-discriminatory, standards-based curriculum structures
- B. Uniqueness of local and national content
- C. Literacy
- D. Numeracy
- E. Life skills

4. Processes through which trained teachers use child-centred teaching approaches in well-managed classrooms and schools and skilful assessment to facilitate learning and reduce disparities. This can be further sub-divided into following areas:
- A. Teachers: Professional learning for teachers, teacher competence and school efficiency, ongoing professional development, continuing support for student-centred learning, active and standards-based participation methods, teacher feedback mechanisms, teacher beliefs that all students can learn, and teachers’ working conditions.
- B. Supervision and support: Administrative support and leadership, student access to languages used at school, using technologies to decrease rather than increase disparities, and diversity of processes and facilities.

5. Outcomes that encompass knowledge, skills and attitudes, and are linked to national goals for education and positive participation in society. This can be further sub-divided into following areas:
- A. Achievement in literacy and numeracy
- B. Using formative assessment to improve achievement outcomes
- C. Outcomes sought by parents
- D. Outcomes related to community participation, learner confidence and life-long learning
- E. Experiential approaches to achieving desired outcomes
- F. Health outcomes
- G. Life skills and outcomes

This definition allows for an understanding of education as a complex system embedded in a political, cultural and economic context.

UNESCO

EFA Global Monitoring Report by UNESCO proposed the following framework as a means of organizing and understanding the different variables of education quality. The framework is influenced both by context and by the range and quality of inputs available.

Source: UNESCO

Relevance of Education Quality

Million of parent send their children to school everyday so that they may have a bright future. But research by UNESCO institute of statistics paints a grim picture of the progress so far. According to it, 1 in every 3 child globally does not know his/her ABCs and 123s. Over 50% of these children have spent 4+ years in school. Teacher shortages and low salaries exaggerate the problem.

The urgency of improving the quality of education is even more apparent once you look towards the future. In 2017, there are 2.5 billion infants, children, and teenagers in the world. They will be entering the 21st century workforce which faces megatrends such as automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. According to a new report by McKinsey Global Institute, automation could destroy as many as 73 million jobs by 2030 in US alone.

But the report also strikes a positive note. It states that economic growth, rising productivity and other forces could more than offset the losses. An important factor in rising productivity will be the quality of education. Maybe it was this understanding the spurred the world to agree on education quality as a global priority. If you have followed the news lately, you know that such agreements have become rarer these days. Not only did everyone agree but they also placed targets for the world to achieve over the next 15 years.

Source: UNDP

It is a step in the right direction. But now the real quest begins. Turning these goals into changes on the ground.

Source: Global Education First Initiative

Indian Context

The achievement of quality education on the ground will play out differently in each country depending on their level of development and education baseline. Under UN’s economic classification, India is a low income country. As per research, the quality debate in such economies tends to focus on access, livelihoods, and primary school.

In these terms, India is one of the model nations in the developing world with programs such as Sarva Siksha Abhiyaan, ICDS, and Mid-day meal scheme. But the education baseline in the country remains weak on a global scale.

Source: Our world in data

ASER is the largest annual household survey in rural India that focuses on the status of children’s schooling and basic learning. ASER 2016 survey was carried out in more than 17,000 villages covering more than 550,000 children in the age group 3–16. Some of the major insights of the survey are as under:

1. 7 out of every 10 children are enrolled in government schools
2. 3 out of every 5 Std III children are unable to read at least Std I level text
3. 1 out of every 4 Std VIII children cannot read at least Std II level
4. 3 out of every 4 Std III children could not do a 2-digit subtraction
5. 3 out of every 4 Std V children could not do simple division problems
6. The proportion of Std VIII students who could not correctly do a 3-digit by 1-digit division problem was 31.6% in 2010. This number jumped to 55.8% in 2014, and has further increased to 56.7% in 2016
7. 7 out of every 10 Std III children could not read simple words in English
8. 3 out of every 4 Std V children could not read a simple sentence in English
9. In 2009, 39.8% of children in Std VIII could not read simple sentences in English. This figure was 53.3% and 54.2% in 2014 and 2016 respectively.
10. In 2009, attendance was at 74.3% in primary schools. The figure for 2016 is 71.4%. Similar data for upper primary schools shows a decline from 77% in 2009 to 73.2% in 2016.

Challenges in Achieving Quality Education

None of the findings in the ASER survey would be relevant without an understanding of the challenges faced on the ground. Some evidence suggests that expansion beyond pilot programmes often falters even when pilot programmes are successful and educational agencies provide adequate resources. Several reasons for this exist (Obanya, 1995) including:

• Teachers often find curricular integration and interdisciplinarity difficult, especially when the teacher does not have a role in curriculum design;
• Subjects that do not appear on important examinations are not always taken seriously;
• Social attitudes towards the subject may not be favorable, and cultural patterns are difficult to change;
• Ideas conceived in other regions of the world may not be adequately adapted to the local context;
• Political and economic instability can lead to discontinuity in policies and programmes, as well as teacher and administrator turnover.

These obstacles pose serious but not insurmountable challenges to educational programming. The value of quality content, however, makes finding solutions to such challenges critical. To be most effective, quality content must be situated in a context of quality processes.

World Bank proposed the following as six necessary components (referred to as the 6 As) to achieve education reforms:

1. Assessment: Benchmarks and benchmark-based assessments are the cornerstone of education planning and reform aiming to improve quality. Countries that are unable to determine where their education system stands currently will find it difficult to make improvements or to reach their goals. One example of success in this area can be found in Jordan, where use of international tests for benchmarking and the use of feedback loops led to impressive gains.
2. Autonomy: Empowering schools will determine quality improvements. This includes giving them ownership, resources, and voice while enhancing school competitiveness. Across Australia, Canada, Finland, Japan and Korea — the five OECD countries with both an above-average student performance in science and a below-average impact of socio-economic background on student performance — 80% of 15-year-olds are in schools which report competing with one or more other schools in the area for students. Students in districts with 85% of schools competing with other schools tend to perform better. Autonomy’s potential for transforming education systems depends on whether increased autonomy is accompanied by enhanced accountability mechanisms.
3. Accountability: As mentioned, autonomy and accountability are closely related. Accountability increases time on task and academic achievement. As decision-making power is redistributed, local authorities, school principals, teachers, and students are given new responsibilities for resource deployment and school activities. In an autonomy-based structure, school principals are held accountable to municipal authorities for (efficient) use of financial resources. Likewise, school principals are held accountable to both parents and local authorities for improving the learning environment and outcomes. An accountability-based system usually entails a shift of decision-making authority from the government to the community, which is represented by school governing boards and integrated by teachers, parents, and community members. In the United Kingdom in 1988, the government gave public secondary schools the option of removing local education authority control and becoming autonomous grant-maintained (GM) schools. GM schools were funded by a new agency but were owned and managed by the school governing body, a new 10–15 member entity composed of the head teacher, as well as teacher and parent representatives. Research finds large achievement gains at schools that voted for GM.
4. Attention to teachers: Studies across the world show that a good teacher–one that adds value to the learning process– can be effective in helping students to improve their learning outcomes. The top-performing school systems recruit their teachers from the top third of each graduate cohort: top 5% in South Korea, top 10% in Finland, and top 30% in Singapore and Hong Kong SAR, China. This screening helps to ensure that teachers possess the skills and knowledge necessary to be effective educators. Additionally, in-service training helps teachers to maintain those skills.
5. Attention to early childhood development: Early childhood development (ECD) may be the most cost-effective educational investment. Empirical evidence demonstrates that quality ECD interventions increase educational success and adult productivity, and decrease public expenditures later on. A study in Jamaica found that children in a treatment group, whose mothers were taught ways in which to promote cognitive, physical, and emotional development during their child’s early years, earned on average 42% more as young adults than children in the control group who did not receive these benefits.
6. Attention to culture: Culture is important and often neglected. The use of the mother tongue as the language of instruction is one cultural area frequently disputed in many countries. For some, the topic has political overtones, for others it can be associated with religious values, and still for others costs are used as an excuse for opposition. In many countries, a significant number of students do not speak the national language in the home, which has practical implications for education. We, and others, have found that schools using mother tongues as the language of instruction have higher attendance and promotion rates, and lower repetition and dropout rates. This trend has specifically been noted in the case of indigenous peoples in Guatemala. Students also better learn their national language by the end of basic education if they first become literate in their mother tongue.

Checklist for Measuring Education Quality

There are various checklists available for quality assesment that have been developed after years of research and piloting. We do not intend to add another one. We have collated below the lists from authorities in their respective fields across early childhood, primary, and secondary education:

1. Preschools by National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) — US-based
2. Playschools by National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR)
3. Primary and secondary schools by Quality Council of India (QCI)
4. Secondary schools by National Council Of Educational Research And Training (NCERT)

Concluding Thoughts

Education is not simply a content delivery system; rather, it is a system designed to help all children reach their full potential and enter society as full and productive citizens — Sean Slade, Senior Director, Global Outreach, ASCD

Every moment that we are not achieving the goal of quality education is harming the future of a child somewhere. As a parent, your first responsibility is towards your child. You too can contribute to the cause of quality education. One way is to understand your child’s individual potential, find the means to harness it, direct him/her, listen to their feedback, and be flexible about the changes that happen along the way. This potential should not be benchmarked against siblings or other children around them. If charity began at home in this way, maybe we will set new benchmarks for quality instead of trying to achieve them?

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