Education strategy 2010
5.1 Improving the quality of education
How can we improve the quality of education?
What we think is required is:
- Establishing and protecting cognitive functions in early childhood
- Focus on learning outcomes measurement particularly in the foundation years
- Diagnostic use of learning outcomes measurement to inform systemic quality improvements
- Greater focus on what happens in the classroom: teachers, teaching and learning
- A holistic perspective that recognises the inter-dependence of primary, secondary and tertiary education.
However, there are still further questions to answer. Please read and respond to these in the following sections.
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Our thanks for all the comments submitted. All of the ideas and suggestions put forward will feed into our new policy, helping to shape the direction of our work.
Once the final policy document is released you will be able to find it at www.dfid.gov.uk
Also in this section:
4th Bullet: Greater focus on what happens in the classroom: learners and learning, teachers and teaching. I am of the view that learners and learning are more important and thus should come before teachers and teaching as learning actually occurs even in the absence of the teacher.
5th Bullet: I would suggest to consider the interdependence of pre-primary, primary, secondary and tertiary education. Indeed, pre-primary education has been overlooked for so long yet it is the very foundation of education.
I think it is important to remember that learning does not only occur in the classroom. I believe that DFID should take a more holistic view of learning which encompasses not only who is learning (this can be teachers learning from students, students learning from each other, students/teachers learning from parents and the community etc. as well as students learning from teachers), but also where this learning takes place (i.e. not just in the classroom but in other parts of the school as well such as the playground/canteen etc., on school trips and of course outside of school when children are at home or in their local community.
Focus on teacher training instittuions in each country, support staff there to do the research that is needed, set up a network to compare data between countries in a supportive and collaborative way (can use ICT tools for this). Where schools don’t have access, local companies may have and may share with the teachers.
support teacher training staff there to do the research that is needed, set up a network to compare data between countries in a supportive and collaborative way (can use ICT tools for this). Where schools don’t have access, local companies may have and may share with the teachers.
Teachers are the key here and are a deciding factor in the quality of education. DFID should focus more attention on ensuring that all teachers are given high-quality pre-service training and in-service CPD (Continuing Professional Development), which includes training in participatory inclusive teaching methods. Dfid should outline in its strategy how it is going to support countries in identifying sustainable sources of funding for teacher salaries. IMF loan policies present massive obstacles for poor countries trying to develop effective education systems. Dfid should be ensuring that education spending in developing countries should be exempt from IMF imposed budet ceilings. Dfid should allow developing countries to spend its aid for its inteneded purpose.
We need the right teachers to teach our kids. We need a holistic approach in education. Teachers must teach from the heart – love and understand the children’s need and background. Early childhood development is fundamental. In order to decide what are the necessary learning subjects and types of classroom environment or teaching tools that teachers should introduce in the class is by scanning the major problems the young people (or the grown-up) faces today and also asking what and how do we want the children to become in the future at least by the age of 12 or 18 – academically, cognitively, socially, physically and emotionally (perhaps spiritually too). I hope this would help. I believe so much that we should really look into the life-cycle of human being in order to design the future education systems. I have always uses the human lifecyle in my records management talks in which planning prior to the first phase is indeed very crucial because it provides from end to end management framework. Thank you.