A framework for quality education

A strategic framework of Quality Education for developing countries Defining, measuring and developing quality education in Kathmandu schools

Dr Brian Metters & Mrs Sangita Bhandari - 8 July 2015 A joint paper from Nepal Schools Aid (UK) and Nepal Education Leadership Foundation 

Synopsis In this paper we describe a simple but comprehensive framework to define Quality Education as a process, one which can be used as a strategic model to transform Nepal’s education system. A number of tools are also described to monitor quality improvement at various intervals and some data is provided where the model and tools have been used in Kathmandu primary schools. The work described is part of an MPhil research project being undertaken by Mrs Bhandari at Kathmandu University.

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Introduction This paper is intended to reenergise the focus on quality education provision in Nepal where our work is conducted with Kathmandu primary schools. It is driven not only by the ongoing failure of Nepal's School Sector Reform Plan (SSRP) but also by the Muscat Agreement (2014) which began to define new goals to supersede the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in education.

The SSRP was published in late 2009, and with a budget of $4 billion was a strategic document aimed at transforming Nepal's education system. Contributions had been made by many international organisations and funding flowed from USAID, DFID, ADB and the EU to name but a few. Since inception however, despite some gains in enrolments especially amongst girls, there has been a catastrophic decline in survival rates and exam pass rates. This seems surprising because the SSRP placed a heavy emphasis on the QUALITY of education, mentioning the word "quality" 84 times in its 144 page document, stating that "strategic interventions would be made ....... to improve quality education", and having a lengthy appendix detailing quality as comprising Quality Improvement and Quality Assurance. Everyone therefore should understand the importance of quality, what it meant, how to measure it, and what steps to take to develop it! Schools, Principals, teachers, management committees, District Education Offices, Ministry officials, education experts had only to read the appendix and they would have full understanding of what was required: or would they? And even if they didn't understand the requirements and issues of quality, there had been numerous reviews and articles on quality education in the past 15 years such as from UNICEF 2000 (1), the UNESCO 2005 (2), and Mary Joy Pigozzi 2008 (3) and more recently from Open Society Foundations at the University of Bristol 04/2015 (4) which goes beyond the post MDG education goal indicators already mentioned and which has a refocus on a "rights based approach" to quality education indicators.

All of these papers and documents are rigorous and well researched, wide in their scope of defining quality, and … mostly ignored in the developing world. Indeed it could be argued that the large donor agencies have ignored them too, because over the past decade there has been a complete focus on the issue of getting every child into school, particularly girls, with no corresponding focus on how these children are educated once they get there. In Nepal for example there may well be a 95% enrolment rate into primary schools, but only a 50% chance of survival to class 10 and shockingly only a 15% chance of passing the School Leaving Certificate. So what is going on here, why do children fail the final exams, why do they drop out along the way? And just as importantly, why are the donor agencies communicating exclusively about funding to get more children into school as opposed to funding to RETAIN children in school?

Our experience in Nepal suggests that the overwhelming reason for a failure to focus on the quality of education is that all of the research and papers show the COMPLEXITY of the concept without being helpful to practitioners at the school or system levels.

Instead we should be finding ways to SIMPLIFY understanding which can be used by schools, principals, teachers and ministry officials either in the creation of system transformation plans or school improvement plans.

Therefore our purpose is to propose a comprehensive yet simple framework to define quality education, one that can be used as a strategy for transforming the whole system, as a vision or goal to be attained by a school, and as a guide to enhance the commitment to their profession by individual principals and teachers.

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The Framework Our proposed framework is designed to be used in four dierent ways:

1. The education system: The framework can provide a goal for what needs to be achieved and to identify the main areas for action.

2. The school: The framework can provide the headings for a school improvement plan, so that essential areas for development can be identified and worked on.

3. The principal: The framework helps a school principal to understand their role in visionary leadership especially in working with the SMC.

4. The teachers: The framework provides greater clarity and understanding of their role and influence over quality education with children in their care.

These are essential requirements if quality is to be improved, and our experience shows that this is possible in even the most underprivileged and under-resourced of government schools in Kathmandu. The start point is the simplest of definitions of education found in most English dictionaries, "the process of teaching or learning" plus the belief that quality is concerned with excellence. Therefore quality education is concerned with having a PROCESS with a high level of excellence and our framework tries to reflect this as shown in Fig 1 below. It is organised into 3 areas containing 13 components which we will describe in more detail.

Fig. 1 NELF Framework of Quality Education

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This is a practical framework that acts as a PROCESS and that can be used to guide the development of the quality of education in schools and whole education systems. It is the result of over a year’s research in Nepal in which primary schools were developed via teacher training and coaching, principals were trained in leadership, and a monitoring process was developed which used child perception tests and teacher lesson observations. The NELF Quality Education Framework highlights that quality education is a PROCESS comprising three major components and which centres on the needs of the child which are primary and must be met. Secondly, the system must deliver a number of clear education outcomes all of which are measurable. Thirdly, and most importantly, there are a series of education inputs that must be made for child needs to be met and for education outcomes to be achieved. We have outlined the elements within each major component in Appendix 1 below and believe that this framework can and should be used, especially in developing countries, to inform and guide any strategy aimed at transforming a country’s education system.

Measuring Quality Improvement The measurement of quality education is obviously imperative if a school or a whole system is trying to improve, and much has been written about it. Unfortunately very little progress had been made to find indicators of quality until the recent UNESCO Institute of Statistics initiative at the end of 2014 and submitted as a proposal in 2015 (5).

The problems are always the same however, complexity and time lag. We have already raised the issue of complexity so won't labour it here. But time lag is a major problem because all too often it is exam results that are deemed to be the primary measure of quality. So, if a high percentage of students pass the relevant exams then quality must be high, or so it is assumed. But this is based on waiting anything from 1 to 5 to 10 years before measurement is made! Too late for the students to know. (We realise that there are also issues of exams being relevant to quality or not and the use of formative instead of summative assessment).

Perception Tests of Quality To make a contribution to the measurement of quality education we wanted to determine whether we could develop a “test of quality” that could be applied at any time to give a snapshot of the situation. The idea came from the use of short perception tests or surveys in everyday life such as whether one had received a "quality service" during a complaint, or the "quality of service" in setting up a new bank account, or the quality of hospital treatment received, or the quality of service provided to a local community by a medical centre. In all of these examples there is an opinion being given about the quality of service by the customer, and we started to think along the lines of the student being the customer. And why not?

Structurally, perception tests are very simple: a series of statements describing the components of quality you want to measure, and a scale to judge whether the component was delivered or not. Technically these are known as Dimensions and Likert Scales. So, a statement for a bank account measure might be "The form to complete was difficult to understand" and the scale to judge might be 1. Completely disagree, 2.

Disagree a little, 3. Neither agree nor disagree, 4. Agree a little, 5. Completely agree.

Results for all dimensions are collected from lots of customers and a numerical index of

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quality of account service can be scored. Can this be done by students in an education setting? The answer is "Yes", and it already has.

We know of two examples where this type of perception test has been used in education. The first is the SEEQ (6) developed by Prof. Herbert Marsh, University of Oxford, and the second is MALS (7) developed by Prof. Bob Burden, University of Exeter.

SEEQ was developed as a test to measure students perception of the quality of education they were receiving at tertiary level, and MALS was developed to measure the "learning self concept" in children aged 9 to 16 years. Specific reference to this work is given later.

The Quality Education Index We used the framework described here to create our own Quality Education Perception Test (QEPT) in which we created a set of 28 Statements/Dimensions from the Quality Education Framework and a 5 point Likert scale. We chose 12 statements describing Child Needs and 16 statements describing Education Inputs for the questionnaire with a set of administration instructions to ensure reliability of implementation. The QEPT was then applied to cohorts of children in primary schools, grades 3-6, ages 8-12 years. The test was applied TWICE in all cases, firstly prior to any teacher training or school development work in the school, then secondly after 3-4 months of such work being implemented. The results from 27 schools and over 3500 children showed an initial average QEPT score of 54, rising to an average of 70 after 3-4 months of school development work from NELF Education Tutors.

This was encouraging, and we can also now state that schools can achieve scores of as high as 85+ after one year of development. The school score has been named the Quality Education Index, QEI, and its wider use is described in a later section.

This work is obviously continuing as we engage with more schools and over a longer period of time to conduct validity studies. For example we are collecting data on school enrolments, survival rates and exam passes to check for correlations with the QEPT scores, but this is over an extended time period. In addition, one of us is conducting research into the specific eect of pedagogy on the QEPT scores and we have developed an observation tool so that lessons in school can be objectively and consistently observed. The output score is a measure of Child Centred vs Teacher Centred learning which we have named the Child Centred Index, CCI. This work is also showing good results and will be written and published once the research is concluded.

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Applying the Framework It is our belief that any framework describing quality education needs to have multiple uses at multiple levels, including by teachers, principals, school management committees and of course the whole system. Otherwise, what was the point of creating it in the first place. In fact this was our intention from the beginning, we are practitioners not academics and wanted a practical device to help schools within Nepal’s education system improve. The sub sections below now describe some of the contexts within which we have used the framework:

Individual Teachers When we work to develop a school every teacher from that school attends a series of training courses over a 3 months period, including the school principal. The first course is our 5 days Foundation in Child Centred Learning with the first day covering a range of topics from educational psychology. At the beginning of the first day we discuss the concept of quality education and it is often disheartening to find that teachers views mostly centre on quality being most related to the physical environment, textbooks, and exam results. However, it is very encouraging to see a slow change as we introduce our quality framework and they learn about child needs such as development stages, specific inputs such as different pedagogy etc. What they realise and are motivated by is the realisation that they are PART of something bigger, and that their role is central to developing the child in more ways than they had imagined. Being shown the bigger picture is a different approach from constantly being “beaten up” and taking all of the blame for poor quality. What it also means is that the conversations with them about implementing better pedagogy are much more positive and focused when we go into schools to coach them.

School Principals One of our courses for principals/head teachers is a 6 day leadership programme that has alternating days between the training room and back in their schools. The whole course is based on Leadership being concerned with three components; Vision, Values, Development. On the first day the principals revisit the framework they first encountered on the teacher Foundation programme and are shown how it can be used to assess the current state of their school against all 13 components. Then they must “vision” their school in 5 years time and how a future state would be different against all 13 components again. What they now realise quite strongly is how much of the framework’s components they can influence themselves if they show the right type and level of leadership. Once again the type of conversation between principals and teachers on a regular basis now changes to be something more positive.

School Management In Nepal’s public schools much of the management and governance is the responsibility of the School Management Committee and they have a very difficult job to do. In many cases they are not so educated themselves and have little or no understanding of their role or focus. However, we help them along with the principal to write their School Improvement Plan using the framework’s 13 components as headings.

This follows on from the leadership training received by the principal who now has greater clarity to develop his school, a greater sense of direction, and greater team working with their committee. The practical framework has “opened their eyes” to the

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requirements of quality education and just what needs to be done to improve. The School Improvement Plan is a mandatory requirement for local District Education Offices.

Whole System Transformation This is obviously a massive undertaking, but also obviously it is not being achieved in Nepal. We submit that this is partly because there is no clear framework for quality education development that could be used as a vision/direction or as a strategy.

One of us is an organisational psychologist with considerable experience in system transformation. This experience has been built over several decades in which it has been shown time and time again that systemic change can only occur when there is “congruence” between four specific components; a clear strategy giving direction, the right people providing capability, an enabling culture which drives commitment, and set of structures (especially processes and systems) allowing control. These four components are part of The Congruence Model for system transformation which has been written about extensively on one of our personal websites at www.brianmetters.wordpress.com.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to write extensively on the topic of transforming the whole education system in Nepal, but our work over the past 8 years has always been concerned with helping to improve the whole system, not just a few or even several hundred schools in Kathmandu.

Summary & Conclusions We propose a framework of Quality Education that is simple, practical, and widely applicable in Nepal. We have used the framework in teacher training, principal’s training and school development programmes. We have developed a tool for perception testing of primary school children and shown how the scores from these tests improve over a 3 months period following the NELF school development programme.

We are conducting further research into a tool for pedagogy observation and measurement with a view to correlating pedagogy style with quality.

We are also gathering data on enrolments, survival and exam rate passes to use in validity studies.

Finally, the framework we have created has clearly been useful in developing a number of Kathmandu primary schools and we invite those responsible for the whole system to consider scaling up our development process.

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Appendix 1 The NELF Quality Education Framework Education Inputs

Child Needs

1. National policies & standards • resource allocation • appointments • performance management • class size • child protection • equality of gender, caste etc 2. Curriculum Content • applied knowledge • life skills • values/attitudes/behaviour 3. School Governance • flexible timetabling • teacher attendance monitored • financial monitoring • community liaison • strong leadership 4. School Environment • physical environment optimised for learning • psychosocial environment optimised for learning 5. Essential Resources • Human: Qualified, competent, committed teachers • Physical: adequate toilets, water, space, furniture • Financial: adequate funding available 6. Learning Process • Pedagogy: child centred • Assessment: balanced, formative • Teacher Development: continuous, skills, subjects.

1. Staged Development of the child • appropriate stimulation • personal teacher attention 2. Care & Protection • safe physical & psychological environment • personal understanding from the teacher 3. Socio Culturally Appropriate • gender differences accounted for • ethnic tolerance applied • family support encouraged • peer support and friendship • mother tongue instruction 4. Personal Learning needs met • auditory, visual, kinaesthetic • special needs

Inputs

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Child Needs

Education Outcomes 1. Cognitive outcomes • literacy • numeracy • core subjects • problem solving skills • creative & critical thinking 2. Moral outcomes • respect • tolerance • equality • community • human rights 3. Social outcomes • self-esteem • personal-peer relationships • personal hygiene

Outcomes

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References 1. UNICEF, Defining Quality in Education, A paper presented at The Meeting of the International Working Group on Education, Florence, Italy, June 2000.

2. UNESCO EFA Global Monitoring Report, 2005.

3. Towards an Index of Quality Education, Mary Joy Pigozzi, 2008.

4. Indicators For All, Open Society Foundations, University of Bristol 04/2015.

5. UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2015, http://www.uis.unesco.org/Education

6. SEEQ, (Herbert Marsh) W Addison, Assessing and Using Student Evaluations of Teaching, (Download from http://bit.ly/1gpydW9)

7. MALS, Burden, R.L. (1998) ‘Assessing children’s perceptions of themselves as learners and problem solvers. The construction of the Myself-As-a-Learner Scale’.

School Psychology International 19 (4), 291-305.

The Authors

Brian Metters, BA (Psychol.), MSc., PhD, is the Chairman of Nepal Schools Aid, a UK registered charity working to develop the quality of education in Kathmandu primary schools. Now retired from business, Brian is an organisational psychologist and specialised in change management mostly within the financial services industry of the UK. He has been involved in charitable fundraising for Cancer Research, The Big Issue (for the homeless) and disadvantaged children in Nepal. www.nepalschoolsaid.org

Sangita Bhandari, BEd, MEd, is the co-founder of Nepal Education Leadership Foundation in Kathmandu and the manager of their School Development Division. She has 5 years teaching experience specialising in mathematics and has received specialist training in several UK primary schools. She is currently undertaking an MPhil in Education at Kathmandu University. www.nepaleducationleadership.wordpress.com

Both of us would like to acknowledge the work and support of colleagues at NELF especially Babita Shrestha, Indira Sharma, Samjhana Thapa Magar.

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