This paper reviews key documents that have influenced understandings of educational quality
in low income countries amongst international agencies concerned with and researchers
based in Anglophone countries. There is a particular focus on quality as defined with
reference to formal primary education. The paper identifies five dimensions of quality that are
recurring themes of debate on quality. The literature review remains „work in progress‟ that
will take on board more of the literature and thus develop over a period of time, both feeding
into our research programme and being informed by it.
The paper starts by differentiating education from schools and argues that any framework to
conceptualize educational quality is necessarily value-based. Two broad approaches to
understanding quality are then outlined in Part 2 and a selection of key texts reviewed that
falls into each approach. The humanist/progressive approach is characterised by a broad
concern for the development of the whole child and human development or social change.
The second broad approach, the economist approach, is largely concerned with efficiency and
effectiveness, and the achievement of learning outcomes at reasonable cost. Learning
outcomes tend to be narrowly defined in terms of cognitive achievement. This approach is
identified with the World Bank and two key Bank publications are reviewed.
Part 3 summarises the conceptualisation of quality implied in three Education for All
documents: the World Declaration on Education for All, the Dakar Framework for Action and
the Global Monitoring Report 2005: the Quality Imperative. These are found to take a broad
approach to understanding quality that emphasises learning for social development, through
the promotion of Life Skills. However, despite setting goals of quality education in terms that
embrace a broad range of personal and social learning outcomes, assessment of progress in
achieving quality is mainly restricted to those cognitive learning outcomes that are easy to
measure using pen and paper tests. Part 4 complicates the dichotomous schema used to
categorise understandings of educational quality by drawing on Chitty‟s three concepts of
schooling. These are schooling for human fulfilment, schooling as preparation for the world of
work and schooling for social progress or change. In part 5, the authors present five key
dimensions to education quality that have emerged from their reading of the literature. The
conclusion poses questions raised by these five dimensions for the development of the
EdQual programme of research