3
Education satisfaction and expectations
Despite the many challenges facing education systems and youth learners in the past two decades, youth in all three cases consistently place a high value on formal education and overwhelmingly say they want to achieve more of it than they already have. They also largely rate its quality reasonably well but indicate clearly that there is substantial and at times serious room for improvement. Youth further outline strikingly similar key factors affecting their ability to attain their desired level of education in their diverse settings. A lack of these inputs might, among other things, be sources of increased dissatisfaction among youth. At the same time, youth most often say that the effort they themselves put into making the most of formal education opportunities is key in ensuring they reach their education goals. As outlined in other areas of this study, however, many youth also say and show – with at times high levels of absenteeism – that their motivation is strained by a wide range of pressures.
How youth rate education quality Most youth in Kosovo, Georgia and Tajikistan rate education quality in their country as about average or better, as shown in Figure 27. This consistent convergence of youth opinions mostly outside the range of ‘bad’ and ‘very bad’ is impressive, given the difficulties facing the education systems and learners in these areas. Each of the countries and their populations have clearly managed to maintain or build back formal education systems that meet a range of expectations, if by no means all or well enough. Interestingly however, although Tajikistan is often assessed as bearing more social, political and economic instability than Kosovo and Georgia by the indices reviewed for UNICEF’s larger study on the impact of instability on education quality for youth, the largest proportion of Tajikistan’s youth call quality ‘good’, while the largest proportions of youth in Georgia and Kosovo feel it is just ‘average’. Responses to other topics surveyed describe more about why this might be, but clearly, bearing a higher or lower level of instability does not consistently correlate with better or worse youth perceptions of the state of education quality. Figure 27. On a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is very bad, 2 is bad, 3 is average/not good or bad, 4 is good and 5 is very good, how would you rate the quality of the provision of education in Kosovo/Georgia/ Tajikistan today?* Percentages of youth responses (by all)
50
47.1 40.4
40
35.7
10
30.1
30.2
30 20
46.5
16.2
14.3 9.9
9.3 4.8 4.8
3.5
3.1
3.7
0 Very Good
Good Kosovo
Average Georgia
Bad
Very Bad
Tajikistan
*See Appendix 3 for the wording this question for each case. *See Appendix 2 for the of wording of this question for each case.
More tepid enthusiasm in Georgia and Kosovo might reflect poorer quality education in these areas compared with Tajikistan; however, response patterns throughout the rest of the survey are not strongly suggestive
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Demand for Education Innovation: Adolescent and youth perspectives on education quality in the CEECIS Region