Education of Quality for ALL (EQFA) - Myth or Reality!” by Prof V Chinapah

Education of Quality for ALL (EQFA) - Myth or Reality!

By Professor Vinayagum Chinapah

Stockholm University SWEDEN

Vinayagum Chinapah (Sweden and Mauritius) is Professor, Chair Holder and Head of the Institute of International Education (IIE), Department of Education, Stockholm University, Sweden since 2009. He joined IIE in 1976 and served in different professional and research capacities from a lecturer up to the present position as Professor and Director. He had a Master Degree in Pedagogy with Honors at Charles University, Prague (1977) and a PhD in International and Comparative Education at Stockholm University (1983). He served as Deputy-Director of IIE for the period 1983-1992. Professor Chinapah took leave from IIE in 1992 to be at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris as Director of the Joint UNESCO-UNICEF International Program on Monitoring the Quality of Education and Learning Achievement which covered some 80 countries worldwide during the period (1992-2006). He also served for one year as UNESCO Regional Educational Adviser for the Arab States, UNESCO Regional Office, Beirut, Lebanon (2007-2008) before returning back to lead IIE in January 2009. Professor Chinapah is member of various research associations and research councils and author and co-author of some 70 books, chapters in books, scientific journal articles as well as some 160 reports, conference papers, training manuals and prototypes for capacity building workshops world-wide. He has done research, training, and consultancies for several UN agencies (UNESCO, UNICEF. UNDP, FAO); International agencies (The World Bank, OECD); bilateral agencies (SIDA, Finnish CIMO, CIDA, Commonwealth Secretariat) and several national governments and institutions in some 140 countries world-wide over the past 40 years. He has supervised and co-supervised more than 60 PhD students and some 450 MA students who successfully completed under his leadership their thesis and graduated during the period 1981-2020.

Introduction There is a bourgeoning literature with an open discourse over the question whether an Education of Quality for ALL (EQFA) remains a myth or is it still a reality! There is a national discourse in Mauritius right now on the actual implementation of a policy for EQFA in view of the results shown for the 2019 students’ cohorts of the School Certificate (SC) and the Higher School Certificate (HSC) examination/performance, respectively. The author has written extensively on this “problematics” after several years of international and comparative research in this field of scientific inquiry. This policy paper is based on the sole premise that “(F)ailing or passing learners do neither represent nor justify what is learnt and what is not learnt”. There is therefore a need, more than ever, to understand the dynamics in teaching and learning within the framework of an education of quality for ALL (EQFA) based upon a learner-centered pedagogy so as to establish what must be taught and how each learner must be better prepared to optimize her/his learning potentials and attributes (Chinapah,

2010:15). 1 The overriding remaining question is whether we have, or whether we do make use, of informed-educational policymaking with evidence-based research to address this policy question. It is within the EQFA framework that I can think of any new educational paradigm for learning and instruction.

As many scholars have often argued, “research for research sake” which is based and locked only within the research community, does not have any impact whatsoever on educational policymaking. It will make no difference to the community of learners and their teachers. Husén and Kogan (1980) devoted an entire book several decades ago to this concern in their publication entitled “Educational Research and Policy-Making – How Do they Relate”. To this effect, I would like to propose in this brief policy paper that learnercentered education cannot be separated from an Education Quality for ALL (EQFA).

The recent years have witnessed serious paradigm shifts in the policy-discourse of what might constitute education quality in leaving a number of pertinent questions unanswered, for example who defined it, in which contexts, for what purpose, in whose interests, and for whose benefits, the latter being the most crucial one. The grand educational paradigms have not so changed that much the policy-discourse in order to effectively address EQFA with learner-centered pedagogy and learning, and on what goes on in the classroom. Likewise, the several initiatives that were taken to assess EQFA through worldwide surveys of learning outcomes did not change that much the implied policy-discourse. Chinapah and Cars (2010:4) 2 argued in their review of such surveys that “(t)hese national, regional and international assessments allow for the benchmarking of student performance against corresponding international standards. Learning outcomes in classrooms are often characterized by diversity with a wide range of abilities, which may include some students requiring special needs and supports. This indicates that standards and how to achieve them must be tailored to every student. These concerns for equity and diversity in education access and opportunity is such an alarm against external prescriptive standards, which is developed at national and international level.” 3

UNESCO, immediately after the World Forum of Education for ALL (EFA) in March 2000 in Dakar, Senegal made an in-house inventory to come to reasoning and to provide a solution to this bourgeoning issue for its Member States. I had the honour to be assigned the responsibility and coordination of this task and wrote then, the UNESCO position policy paper of Education Quality from the inputs drawn in this inventory (Chinapah, 2003). 4 Much of the elements from this UNESCO position policy paper will be used in this brief presentation and discussion. At the international development cooperation level, focus on research on learning outcomes has increased various stakeholders’ attentions on results, which may increase accountability based on performance. In the academia itself, such a pursuit has

1 Chinapah, V. (2010) “Education of Quality For All – Myth or Reality!” Keynote Address at the INTERNATIONAL INVITATIONAL CONFERENCE-MAURITIUS, Millennium Development Goals Revisited: Transforming Teaching, Learning and Leadership in Commonwealth Contexts, 29 June - 1

July 2010, Mauritius. 2 Chinapah, V., and Cars, M. (2010) “Glocal Efforts towards Quality Education for All”, Paper accepted and presented at the World Comparative Education Society, Istanbul, Turkey.

3 Chinapah, V. (1997) Handbook on Monitoring Learning Achievement: Towards Capacity- Building. UNESCO, Publishing, Paris.

been very enriching through school survey research initiatives. The richness, implications, trengths and weaknesses of these surveys, whether they are international, regional, national, cross-sectional or longitudinal, have been constantly under review. For example, in their recent review of the findings from such kind of research, Chinapah, et at., (2010:4) concluded as follows:

However, from a comparative research perspective across different nations, barely very little is known about what constitutes effective teaching and effective learning in different situational contexts, both between- and within- countries. The more so, hardly any explanation is given for children from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds in different types and school locations. “An equal opportunity to learn is no less a human right than an equal entitlement to be in school, regardless of parental income, gender, language or ethnicity…. In many countries, however, large disparities in learning achievement point to deep disparities in opportunity. What students achieve is heavily influenced by both the type of school they attend and the characteristics of their family backgrounds” (UNESCO 2010: 107). Even in a country like Sweden, it is recently argued that among the different factors influencing educational achievement, “segregation”, “decentralization”, “streaming” and “individualization” are all important features determining the level of attainment in the Swedish compulsory schools (Skolverket – Swedish National Agency for Education, , 2010). I can bear witness from several educational systems’ performance that EQFA is a reality in few countries but remains still a myth in most countries of this planet – developed and developing - after having assessed them in my earlier responsibility at UNESCO for the program “Quality Education. I believe that we urgently need at international, regional, national and local levels genuine leadership, collective wisdom and a clear vision for EQFA. Only then, right decisions could be made by the right people and for the right purposes in order to achieve EQFA. This is possible and it is precisely the message I shall deliver in this brief policy paper by looking at EQFA from an international and comparative perspective. Education of Quality for ALL (EQFA) – The Pillar for Human Development

Guaranteeing human rights to an education of quality for all remains one of the greatest challenges of the 21 st century. No more excuses. An education of quality for ALL can empower humankind to make choices, to improve the quality of our life, and to foster our positive attitudes towards each other. The annual Education for ALL (EFA) Global Monitoring Reports (GMRs) continues ringing the alarm bell with barely any impact at national and classroom levels. There is therefore no time to spare as the evidence clearly points at actions and not just at mere rhetoric. There is more than ever a genuine concern about an EQFA. School quality varies across countries and absolute levels of learning are very low in many poor countries. Ensuring that there are adequate, well motivated and trained teachers is vital for effective learning. Furthermore, there is a broad consensus in the international educational community that the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and especially Goal No. 4 “Quality Education” would only remain “wishful thinking” if no significant efforts are made to improve the teaching-learning processes and students’ learning outcomes. There is no doubt that the world would require ambitious but doable multilateral framework to accelerate progress for the implementation of the 2030 SDGs Agenda, and namely “Quality Education”.

it develops are equally important. It is within this perspective that quality in education should be conceived and effectively implemented. We are often talking of globalisation. Globalisation may also mean marginalization of some segments of our most deprived populations. Improved quality in education for ALL should orient globalisation policies, strategies and actions with a human face. The rapid transformation of many societies into the so-called “knowledge-based societies” where knowledge and information increasingly determine new patterns of growth and wealth creation and open-up possibilities, should address more effectively poverty reduction and poverty alleviation strategies through different education and learning channels. Knowledge-based and -led development holds the promise that many of the problems confronting human societies could be significantly alleviated if only the requisite information and expertise were systematically and equitably employed and shared. One major challenge for the international community is how to ensure the free flow of, and equitable access to, knowledge, information, data and best practices across all sectors and disciplines. For the free flow to be meaningful, access to knowledge alone will not be enough. Other needs must also be addressed, such as building human capacities and technical skills and developing content necessary to translate knowledge and information into assets of empowerment and production. It is true that the dimensions of ‘quality’ in education need to be redefined in such a broad context of national development goals and in the search for the most effective strategies to make that development sustainable. Quality education should not be only for a few but for ALL. The urgency to address the needs of learners who are vulnerable to marginalization and exclusion through responsive educational opportunities was pointed out some 20 years ago at the Dakar World Education Forum in April 2000. All learners should be given the right to receive the kind of quality education that does not discriminate on grounds of race, class, disability, ethnicity, religion, language, gender or capability. Any successful EQFA operational framework requires genuine broad-based partnership of major education, and education-related stakeholders, namely the state, regional and local authorities, civil society organizations, associations and groupings, the private sector and above all, parents, teachers and the individual learners themselves. A primary educational challenge for quality in education for ALL is, therefore, the complete elimination of inequalities and barriers that are related to gender, rural-urban location, ethnic or cultural differences and the standards of living. We should need to undermine the inherited imbalances where the rich segment of humankind is becoming educationally richer while the poor segment, educationally poorer. Neither the internationally acceptable and often exported educational models nor any standard model may fully recognise national specific problems and priorities and the differences in their manifestations, gravity and magnitude from region to region, from country to country, and from locality to locality. Sustainable quality in education for ALL programs would therefore necessitate general additional support and resources to educational foundations of different types, forms and levels in order to bring determined improvement of people’s lives based on empowerment, equal partnership and mutual respect. This can only be realised through building and strengthening nations’ endogenous human capacities. EQFA calls upon promoting experimentation, innovation and the diffusion and sharing of information and best practices as well as policy dialogue in education. For instance, ICTs may offer the potential to expand the scope of learning, breaking through traditional constraints of space and time as well as boundaries of current education systems. The accelerating privatization of educational goods and services, partly driven by the potential and impact of ICTs, poses an entirely new challenge for the international community. The challenge is to

define the best use of ICTs for improving the quality of teaching and learning, introducing a higher degree of flexibility in response to societal needs, lowering the cost of education and improving internal and external efficiencies of educational system. Strategies for improving the quality of education and instruction for ALL should provide learners with choices on how they receive information (input modes); on how they practice what they learn (the activities, the processes), and on how they demonstrate what they have learned (output modes). In curriculum differentiation there are many instructional strategies that may help teachers vary their input and output modes, and methods of practice based on individual learner needs. For example, in the field of vocational education and training, it is proposed that such pedagogy should be equally oriented towards school directors and support personnel to focus on learning methodologies and activities that encourage discovery, critical and independent reflection, and auto-learning process. Better use of the new information communication technologies (ICTs) can boost the quality of teaching and learning when conceived and geared towards policies and practices of an education of quality for ALL. Thoughtful programs may, however, be more effective in specific in-service teacher training such as simulated practice-teaching opportunities, and professional upgrading opportunities. Use of communications technologies inevitably shifts interpersonal relations among learners, teachers, parents and stakeholders. These shifts will improve quality only if they can expand and promote mutual understanding based on the respect of diversity Likewise, EQFA cannot be conceived without partnership and participation of major stakeholders. Promoting policy dialogue between all actors and stakeholders in education (governmental, non-governmental – teachers’ associations-, civil society and private sector and intergovernmental organisations) is a major prerequisite for EQFA to succeed. Altogether, good quality teaching and learning processes require an instruction which is appropriate to each child’s learning needs, abilities, and learning styles (active, co-operative, democratic, gender-sensitive learning). Structured content and good quality materials and resources are to be provided. Teacher capacity, morale, commitment, status, and income - and their recognition of child rights is to be enhanced. As we have observed, definitions of quality education are mushrooming today due to the complexity and multifaceted nature of the concept. The terms excellence, value for money, efficiency, effectiveness and world class education have been used interchangeably while referring to quality education. There is, however, considerable consensus that exists around the basic dimensions of quality education. For example the recent results from an international survey carried out in diverse historical, socio-economic, cultural and political settings (e.g. United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Thailand and South Africa) showed that there are three major components forming good quality and effective schooling, namely: (1) Good Teacher-Pupil Relationships; (2) Support for Learning Difficulties; and (3) Good Communications with Parents. A Framework for Action Education of Quality for ALL (EQFA) is the driving force for moving towards a learner-centered pedagogy. Without clear vision and mission accompanied with informed educational policy-making, resourceful implementation strategies, well trained “educational front-line implementers”, and last but the least, an empowered targeted beneficiaries, very little can be expected from contemporary systems of education to move from “teaching to the examination and testing” towards EQFA. Concomitantly, no progress towards an EQFA will be possible without substantial changes in the curriculum, despite all the theoretical

advancements, scientific discourses, and so called “experts’ advice”, as is advocated in this brief policy paper. In the light of this remark, let me now conclude in proposing a framework for action that can be of interest for further discussion, elaboration and scientific inquiry. EQFA should be able to satisfy both basic as well as lifelong learning needs of the individual. A learner-centered pedagogy should enrich the lives of learners for their all-round development. The SDGs No.4 “Quality Education” should therefore be implemented in its totality; otherwise it will continue being a myth. In this context, we need to re-emphasize that “ (R)egardless of gender, wealth, location, language or ethnic origin, quality education for all requires: (1) healthy, well-nourished and motivated students; (2) well-trained teachers and active learning techniques; (3) adequate facilities and learning materials; (4) a relevant curriculum that can be taught and learned in a local language and builds upon the knowledge and experience of the teachers and learners; (5) an environment that not only encourages learning but is welcoming, gender-sensitive, healthy and safe; (6) a clear definition and accurate assessment of learning outcomes, including knowledge, skills, attitudes and values; (7) participatory governance and management; and (8) respect for and engagement with local communities and cultures”. Further: • Policies and strategies for quality improvement necessitate integrated and wellbalanced perspectives for all levels, types and forms of education. There is also an urgent need to adopt effective policies and strategies to identify and include the socially, culturally and economically excluded. This requires participatory analysis of exclusion at household, community and school levels, and the development of diverse, flexible, and innovative approaches to learning and an environment that fosters mutual respect and trust. • Measurable and monitoring indicators of quality education should not only focus on learning inputs but also on learning environments at home, and in the community, on learning processes, and learning outcomes (short-term and long-term). For example, in the area of life skills, multiple quality indicators are needed to account for health, prevention, nutrition, civics and environmental awareness as well as social and communicative skills of learners. Such quality indicators are very important for both formal and non-formal education programs. • Strengthening of democratic structures and institutions, participatory governance and the empowerment of civil society organizations, local educational managers, planners and administrators are indispensable for broad-base commitment towards quality education. Quality education requires good leadership and appropriate human resource development policies and implementation strategies. • Think-tank mechanisms and networks for quality education are to be set-up to assist

Member States in promoting a trans-disciplinary approach within the curricula and educational processes through guidelines, methodologies and other special instruments. • A global dialogue on quality education needs to be cultivated through synergies and strategic alliances. Sharing experiences, outcomes and knowledge of innovative and successful programs and research and development initiatives on quality education should be strengthened. All partners of education - nationally, regionally and internationally – should be brought together to further strengthen this collective perspective of an Education of Quality for ALL (EQFA).