Institute of Development Studies

The MDGs and Primary Education

Felix Bivens, Kathleen Moriarty and Peter Taylor - 9 October 2008

Eight years on, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have delivered mixed results. While there has been progress on many levels, the slow pace of these achievements so far suggests that many goals will not be reached for decades. More positively, achievements in education are generally lifted up as one of the MDG success stories; reducing the number of out of school children by 28 million at the primary level is a tremendous achievement by any measure. Still, in many fragile and conflict-affected states, there has been minimal impact.

Impact at the classroom level

Even where the goals have been more effective, it is important nonetheless to read between these numbers and to consider the impact of these changes at the classroom level. With a few notable exceptions, this staggering increase in enrolments has not been accompanied by significant investments at the national level in building new schools and training additional teachers. Pushed beyond their maximum capacities by the drive to achieve the MDG targets, schools now face exacerbated issues of overcrowded classrooms, shortages of teaching materials and undertrained teachers. Under such conditions the quality of education received by students becomes greatly diminished.

Measuring quality: the problems of exam driven education

Development agencies have attempted to combat these difficulties by addressing directly the issue of quality. While some organisations have advocated for child-centred approaches, the predominant response tends to reflect debates on schooling in developed countries. This has resulted in an emphasis on standardised testing which seeks to measure and ensure the cognitive development of students. Unfortunately, testing rarely meets the immediate needs of children, their families and their communities. Instead ‘teaching to the test' can create an inward-looking and skewed approach to learning that is cut off from its local context. By tying definitions of quality strongly to examination outcomes, supporters of the MDGs run the risk of building up educational programmes that are irrelevant to their immediate development contexts.

An alternative approach

Rather than making the measurable important, a greater focus is needed on how to make the important measurable; that is, how to prioritise learning outcomes that are relevant to the lives and survival of children in developing contexts. One pathway to achieving this may be through transformative education (TE) practices. Rather than operating from a generic curriculum, transformative approaches construct curricula in conjunction with parents and communities to make learning relevant to local contexts and issues. Moreover, TE reconceptualises the role of students and of schools in the life of the community. Students are not only recipients of learning, but they are also empowered to be teachers themselves, to share their new knowledge in the community and in their homes. Transformative schools aim to be hubs of activity in communities, providing not only basic education but also, for example, various forms of skills and entrepreneurial training, adult literacy and parenting classes. All these approaches encourage learners to think critically about their situations and to act collectively to bring about improvement to those contexts.

Transformative Education for multiple development goals

TE has a strong conceptual and methodological base and a significant record of accomplishment, even at the primary level. Two of the best known TE programmes that focus on primary education, Escuela Nueva and Fey y Alegria, have had decades of experience with these methods and have reached millions of students in more than a dozen countries. In these programmes, parents and communities build the curricula in conjunction with the local teachers so that the school itself and the learning of the children become motors of development and social change by generating knowledge and building skills that can help students, families and communities address their commonly expressed concerns. Another benefit is that students from TE schools have also scored remarkably well on standardised exams, suggesting that a transformative approach can complement efforts to heighten children's cognitive development.

Evidence from cases such as these suggests that quality education which incorporates transformative approaches can help to further the attainment of multiple development goals, including the MDGs, with short-term benefits as well as longer-term impacts. Ultimately, TE supports educative processes that empower and involve communities in determining and working toward their own goals for development-rather than universally decreed goals determined a world away from the realities of people's daily lives.

Felix Bivens is a DPhil Student at IDS, Kathleen Moriarty is with Save the Children UK, and Peter Taylor is a Research Fellow at IDS.