Every child, in whatever education setting, has the right to be educated by a qualified teacher. Investment in quality educators has a very high multiplier effect: every good teacher benefits an entire class, year after year, and when those better-educated students become parents they will likely demand a good education for their children, further strengthening the educational system in general. This is certainly true for girls.
Objectives: Quality, Training and Sustainability
The overall objective of the Quality Educators for All Project (Quality-Ed) is to assist public authorities in meeting their responsibility to provide quality public education by improving the quality of the teaching force. Specifically, the project aims for teacher quality based on a consensus based competence profile, training by expanding the provision of high-quality, in-service, professional development and initial education for un(der)qualified teachers and sustainability via advocacy campaigns to incorporate the successful approach of the project in the countries’ education sector policies, plans and programmes.
The Partnership: Reaching Both Formal and Non-Formal Educators
Quality-Ed is a collaboration spanning non- formal and formal education. The partnership between Education International (EI) and Oxfam Novib (ON) has the potential to achieve systemic quality improvements in public services without leaving behind the hard-to-reach populations that NGOs generally serve. This partnership, with the participation of public authorities at national and local levels, ensures that the project is well aligned with government policies and priorities in the education sector. The project’s participative approach, involving ministries of education, local authorities, teacher unions, teacher education institutions, NGOs, parents and other key education stakeholders ensures ownership and high levels of success.
Strategies: A Synergistic Three-Stage Process
The Quality-Ed project has three distinct stages, designed to follow a logical order and to build on each other in a synergistic way.
- STAGE ONE: laying the conceptual groundwork by developing a competence profile and introducing contemporary skills, attitudes and knowledge into teacher training curricula.
- STAGE TWO: providing support to local institutions for the education of teachers and teacher educators that is aligned with the competence profiles and curricula.
- STAGE THREE: advocacy to mainstream project outputs in public services and institutions, including support for civic demands for quality education.
Progress to date
Since its inception in 2007, Quality-Ed conducted feasibility studies in Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Peru and Uganda, leading to the setting up of two pilots in Uganda and Mali. In 2010, project partners in Uganda and Mali developed a national teacher competence profile. National consensus- building around a competence profile is the foundation of subsequent activities, alongside data collection and practical guidance for teachers on life skills. The project is now in the second and third phases in which teachers are being trained according to a competence framework, following on from communication and advocacy activities in 2011 and the subsequent alignment of training systems with the profile. In April 2012, the Ministry of Education and Sports in Uganda launched the dissemination of materials produced under the project, in partnership with the Quality-Ed team in the country. In 2011, ON and EI also commissioned an international comparative study of teacher competence profiles (see below), highlighting the need for defining ‘quality educators’ through a democratic and participatory process among all those with an interest in the quality of education. Following the above study, in 2012, ON and EI developed Guidelines Towards A National Competence Profile for Primary Teachers.
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