Scaling up quality of education

The Frugal Innovation Forum (FIF) is a platform for practitioners to explore frugal innovations in the global South. The theme FIF highlighted this year is: 'Scaling Quality Education' - how can we scale up quality of education and ensure quality education in a resource-constrained south?

Contributed and participated by a consortium of partners like UKaid, Australian Aid, Global Schools Forum, and BRAC, the FIF held a three-day programme on November 9-11 at the Brac Centre for Development Management in Savar. As far as the question of resource constraint is concerned, Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi holds just an opposite view. He said: "I refuse to accept that the world is so poor where just one week of global spending on armies is enough to bring all of our children into classroom".

It is worth noting that while 1-2 per cent of Gross National Product (GNP) is spent on education, 10-15 per cent is spent on defence in almost all the countries of South Asia. In the region nearly 13 million children of 8-14 years are not attending schools.

The good news is that, despite major failure in retention and ensuring completion of grade 5, significant successes could be achieved in Bangladesh and elsewhere in terms of enrolment in primary and secondary levels - almost meeting the Millennium Development (MDG) targets.

In Bangladesh particularly, nearly 95 per cent of the pupils in primary and secondary levels are reported to be enrolled, with girls having an edge over the boys. The reasons for dropouts, and for that matter, poor quality education in schools, are obviously due to problems pertaining to poor teacher quality, burdensome curriculum, vacations which are not suitable for students from poverty-stricken and rural families, etc. 

Increased enrolment at what quality? In rural India, as shown by a survey in 2012, half of all children in grade 5 are unable to read a grade 2 level text. The Directorate of Primary Education conducts National Students Assessment (NSA) once in two years. Instead of all subjects taught at primary level, only Bangla language and Mathematics are tested. The latest NSA conducted in 2015 shows that about two-thirds of the third grades achieved the competencies at the level of their grade which reduced to about one-fourths when they reached at grade five. In Mathematics, 41 per cent of the students of grade III had competencies at the level of their grade which reduced to 10 per cent when they reached at grade V. This indicates that as the students move to upper classes their performance goes down in terms of learning achievement. This raises question about teaching-learning provisions in the primary classrooms.

Faraway in Mali, less that 20 per cent of grade 2 students could read a single word in their native language in 2009; In Nicaragua, only 37 per cent primary school-aged children learned basic mathematics in 2013 and so on.

FIF thus rightly puts quality education at the helm of agenda, specially when Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) emphasises quality education.

Not all issues of FIF can be addressed in this column today. However, we shall pick up two. An interesting debate was held with the motion that 'government should prioritise skills (training) over higher education'. Practitioners like Vice-chancellors, Heads and CEOs of different skills development programmes put forward their viewpoints. Unsurprisingly, perhaps,  the VCs stood against the motion  towing the traditional line of reasoning - universities are centres of researches and excellence that need to be fed with funds, emphasis on higher education means emphasis on overall growth and development, etc.  Farzana Kashfi, Head of BRAC Skills Development Programme, kicked off with  some gloomy statistics: three-fourths of business leaders claimed that there is a scarcity of skilled young workers which is a main challenge to hiring youth in Bangladesh; only 4 in 100 of young people have completed tertiary education.

The debate reminds one the 1997 Report on Human Development in South Asia in which late Mahabubul Huq argued for vocational training centres in every Thana in Bangladesh. The write of this column is of the view that the government should prioritise skills over higher education in a regime of wider global market for exports of goods as well as human capital. Even for the internal economy, the structural shifts at the moment suggest that more needs to be done on the skills front; skills training apparently are more equaliser than tertiary education.  But these two are not mutually exclusive - even university teachers need skill training for class room or laboratory teaching - how to make class lectures more impactful - and VCs too on management - how to manage resources in a  constrained condition.

Another important panel discussion, comprising of Muhammad Musa, James Tooley, and Anir Chowdhury related to the future of education. Muhammad Musa (Executive Director, BRAC) pointed out three main areas of the changes that he foresaw: (a) changes in human capital embodiment itself with wider ramifications in terms of markets and livelihoods; (b) technological leap-frogging with a disconcerting drift towards a digital divide; (c) marketisation of basic services like education with growing participations from private sector. By and large, future education has to hinge on a 'cradle to the grave approach', implying that education upholds every aspect of livelihoods.

Professor James Tooley of University of New Castle strongly argued for market-based education system so that market could address the gap between demand and supply, with the government acting as a watchdog on quality and against foul games in the market. Anir Chowdhury from Prime Minister's Office (a2i0) mostly marked the rapid technological change: robots replacing manual labour or human beings as workers and the necessity of keeping changing upfront in perceptions so that appropriate steps could be taken in time.

Besides panel discussions and debates, the beauty of FIF lies in producing a few innovative models of teaching and learning that are endogenous in technology, cost-effective in finance, and easy to scale up. Any serious attention to quality education should duly take them into consideration.

The writer is a former Professor of Economics at Jahangirnagar University.

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