Angela Little

The Millennium Development Goals: a cross-sectoral analysis and principles for goal setting after 2015

Bringing together analysis across different sectors, we review the implementation and achievements of the MDGs to date to identify cross cutting strengths and weaknesses as a basis for considering how they might be developed or replaced after 2015. Working from this and a definition of development as a dynamic process involving sustainable and equitable access to improved wellbeing, five interwoven guiding principles are proposed for a post 2015 development project: holism, equity, sustainability, ownership, and global obligation. These principles and their possible implications in application are expanded and explored. The paper concludes with an illustrative discussion of how these principles might be applied in the health sector.

Multigrade Teaching: towards an international research and policy agenda

Abstract Despite its prevalence in many educational systems, multigrade teaching remains invisible. In the global effort to achieve education for all in the post-Dakar decade the needs of multigrade teachers, classes and schools must be addressed. The paper (i) explores the meaning of the term multigrade teaching in developing and industrialised countries and identifies a range of conditions under which it arises; (ii) synthesises knowledge of the practice of and research on multigrade teaching; and (iii) proposes an international agenda for future research on and dissemination of policy and practice. The agenda underlines the need for context-specific questions and comparisons, more awareness of the prevalence and challenges of multigrade teaching, more research on the practices and training needs of multigrade teaching and the exploration of synergies between teachers, curriculum, assessment and classroom organisation. It is suggested that knowledge of multigrade teaching strategies is needed by all teachers and not simply those in classes designated as ‘multigrade’.

Development Studies and Comparative Education: context, content, comparison and contributors

This article reviews Comparative Education over the past 20 years, explores the parallel literature of development studies, and identifies future directions and challenges for comparative education. Using Parkyn (1977) as a benchmark, an analysis of articles published between 1977 and 1998 suggests that only a small proportion appear to meet his criteria for comparative education. Parkyns purpose for comparative education, to increase our understanding of the relationship between education and the development of human society, is shared by development studies. Educational writings within development studies have explored the meanings of development and underdevelopment and have raised important questions about the unit of analysis for comparative education. Several reasons are advanced to explain the separate development of these literatures. The contemporary challenge of globalisation presents fresh opportunities and challenges for both literatures. A shared commitment to understanding the role of education in the globalisation process and the reasoned response to it could form the heart of a shared effort in the future. Globalisation also highlights the need for more effective dialogue between comparative educators in different corners of the globe.

Globalisation and educational research: Whose context counts?

Abstract This paper relates contemporary educational research to processes of globalisation. While the activity of educational research is essentially cultural, its production is also economic. As global research agenda emerge, the cultural contexts of those who generate funds and ideas for them are increasingly remote from those in a position to utilise research for the promotion of learning. This paper examines two bodies of research in international education located at very different points in the educational research hierarchy. The first, educational assessment, is extensive and accessible to a worldwide audience of researchers, policy-makers and practitioners in education. The second, multigrade teaching, is small, dispersed and accessible only to those who exercise a dogged persistence. The review of educational assessment underlines the need for a greater contextualisation of research and a greater sensitivity to the context of research by global policy-makers. It raises imperatives for the future conduct of research on educational assessment and international education more generally, and identifies areas for future research on the reciprocal effects of globalisation and educational assessment. The review of multigrade teaching describes briefly what multigrade teaching is, its extent, its relative neglect by researchers and policy-makers, and differences in the economic and educational contexts of the North and the South of the multigrade debate.

Children’s learning practices in Ethiopia: observations from primary school classes

This paper explores questions of relevance to Ethiopian primary education policy. It examines (i) the match/mismatch between government-prescribed pedagogy and actual student learning practices and (ii) the relationship between those practices and school, class and teacher level factors. The paper employs evidence from government documents on curriculum and pedagogy, time-based observations of 5,088 students in 776 mathematics classes and interviews with teachers. In recent years the government has prescribed a shift away from teacher-oriented towards student-centred methods of learning for both the first (Grades 1–4) and second (Grades 5–8) cycles of primary education with a target that 30% of class time be spent on student-centred activity. We find that student-centred activities accounted for just 10.7% of time spent, teacher-oriented activities 74.5% and ‘off task’ 14.7%, with first cycle students more ‘off task’ and second cycle students more ‘teacher-oriented’. In both cycles a student is more likely to be ‘on task’ rather than ‘off task’ if taught by a teacher with a Diploma or a degree, who has not been absent recently and has received supervision within the last four weeks; and more likely to be engaged in student-centred rather than teacher-oriented activity if taught by a female teacher with a Diploma. In the first cycle, ‘on task’ activity is associated with female teachers; in the second cycle with male. In the first cycle student-centred activity is associated with class sizes of less than 26; in the second cycle with class sizes of more than 26 and with less experienced teachers. Policy implications are explored.

Education Policy Reform in Sri Lanka: The Double-Edged Sword of Political Will.

In 1997, the Government of Sri Lanka launched a comprehensive set of education reforms designed to promote equitable access to basic education and improvements in learning outcomes. The package of reforms arose as a political response to widespread youth unrest in the late 1980s and attracted considerable ‘political will’, a vague but much vaunted term in the international policy discourse. Yet, despite seemingly high levels of national political will, reform has not been plain sailing. Using evidence from interviews with policy elites and an analysis of policy texts and evaluations, this paper analyses the role of political will at national and local levels in policy formulation and implementation in a policy environment characterised by ‘patronage politics’. It explores the interaction between the political, administrative, technical, human resource and financial drivers and inhibitors of five reform components and argues that local-level political will, as well as national-level political will, has played a central role in determining whether formulated policies are translated into action on the ground. ‘Political will’ is a double-edged sword.

The growth of foreign qualification suppliers in Sri Lanka: de facto decentralisation?

Based mainly on a study of newspaper adverts for qualifications and tuition courses in Sri Lanka over a period from 1965 to 2000, this paper describes a decentralisation of control over the supply of qualifications. It is argued that this has occurred not through a deliberate policy mechanism to decentralise qualifications, but rather by default, through the more general liberalisation of the economy since 1978. Interviews and documentary analysis indicate that at the beginning of the period under study, education and qualifications in Sri Lanka were largely under the control of the state. However, by the end of the period of study, control over the provision of various qualifications rests with diverse bodies – foreign and domestic, public and private. This constitutes a de facto decentralisation in education and qualification provisions in Sri Lanka, notwithstanding the absence of education policy‐making to this effect.

International and comparative education: what’s in a name?

International education and comparative education are closely related terms. Both feature in the subtitle of Compare. In this anniversary volume Mark Bray explores a wide range of definitions of comparative and international education, describes institutions that promote and reflect one or both fields of enquiry and asks how much these definitions matter. Much of Bray’s discussion exhumes old ‘debates’, rivalries and power struggles among university departments, academic associations and journals about the methods and purposes of comparative and international enquiry. He suggests that the editors of Compare should ‘work harder to define what is and is not within the bounds of comparative education, international education and comparative and international education’ and to consider the ordering of the words international and comparative in the subtitle of the journal. Such an endeavour he suggests would enhance the prestige of the journal and serve the academic community better. While I respect any attempt to reflect critically on the criteria of scholarship employed by different disciplines and fields of enquiry I wonder whether a review of scholars’ definitions – many of them brief, simple and partial in the extreme – rather than an analysis of what scholars do in practice, can move a field of study forward. Catharsis has its place – and journals, departments and associations have their times. In the early twenty-first century how might international and comparative education move forward? As I reflect on the various terms that have been used to describe the departments in which I have worked over the past 37 years1 I recognise much of what Bray writes about term imprecision and boundary porosity. The permutations and combinations of the terms ‘education’, ‘comparative’, ‘international’, ‘development’ and ‘studies’ used by the authors in this anniversary volume underline his points even further. The meanings of these combined terms also reflect the particular histories of academic enquiry in different countries. In this anniversary volume, for example, Robert Arnove presents the work of Schultz, Goulet and Seers as integral elements of comparative and international education as it was studied in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. In the United Kingdom, by contrast, these authors would have been rather unfamiliar to students of university courses titled ‘comparative education’ in the 1960s and 1970s. The work of these authors is more likely to have featured in courses titled ‘education in developing countries’, ‘education and development’ and ‘development studies’. Much of the value of comparative education in the early twentieth century lay in promoting comparisons of similarities and differences in the organisation of education in different nation states. In its time this was an important and path breaking endeavour.

Planning the education-employment link: A brief guide to current methods

Abstract The paper reviews developments in methods available for planning the link between education and employment. Eight techniques are described: manpower planning, rates of return, the basic arithmetic of youth employment, the ILO key informants system, local manpower planning, rapid rural appraisal, the use of existing information, educational planning. Areas for future development include a greater focus on the growth of rural work in relation to the criteria of social demand and equity; the creation of categories of economic activity which have local relevance; the integration of skill development arrangements as one of many factors contributing to economic activity; increased use of existing information; an improvement of networks for the sharing between ministries of education, employment and planning of data of mutual interest; an increase in the speed with which data collected at local level but collated and analysed at national level are redistributed to local level; the development of measures of educational quality.

School quality counts: evidence from developing countries. Editorial

In 2000 the Millennium Declaration issued by the United Nations identified poverty reduction as a main development goal for the 21st century. More specific goals were set by the international community in 2002, including the achievement of universal primary education by 2015. It was in this context that the Young Lives study was established in 2001. Through extensive household, school and community surveys, the Young Lives study follows 12,000 children from two age cohorts in Ethiopia, India, Peru and the state of Andhra Pradesh in India (see www.younglives.org). These comprise 2,000 children in each country born in 2001–02 (the younger cohort) and 1,000 children born in 1994–95 (the older cohort), providing evidence on the evolving relationships between education and poverty during childhood in comparative perspective. Young Lives’ offers a unique longitudinal dataset of linked household and school information stretching from infancy to young adulthood. This special issue employs this evidence to examine how poverty, access to education and school quality combine over the life-course of the child to shape educational experience, outcomes and life-chances, with special reference to the methodological advantages afforded by a dual cohort longitudinal approach across four countries. The overarching research question addressed by the papers in this special issue is: