Understanding the quality debate in education (original) (raw)

This paper discusses some dominant paradigms used to define and explain quality in education both locally and globally. These include policy statements on quality education by UNESCO and the OECD. One of UNESCO's first position statements on quality in education appeared in Learning to Be: The World of Education Today and Tomorrow, followed by Learning: The Treasure Within, the UNESCO Report of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century (Delors, 1996). The quality in education debates are characterised by two broad approaches to academic performance: those that emphasise the technical and rational nature of the outcomes, and those that stress its negotiated nature. In most instances the former approach prevails. It emphasises an output-based approach which is influenced by the performance indicators such as those used in the OECD's PISA study which regularly measures academic performance of students in member and non-member nations. Many countries are influenced by these OECD performance indicators, and by adopting them, set up their own systems of quality control based on the measurement of academic achievement. This paper advances a re-conceptualising of the current outcomesbased quality debate, and suggests a new paradigm of quality pedagogy.