Conceptualising education quality in Zambia: a comparative analysis across the local, national and global discourses

ABSTRACT

Building on the Education for All movement, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development re-emphasises quality education as a discrete goal. Contextualising the discussion surrounding this goal in Zambia, this study examines how education quality is conceptualised by educational stakeholders at local, national, and global levels. Triangulating teacher survey and interview data with policy documents from the government of Zambia and UNESCO, we found simultaneous convergence and divergence regarding the concepts of education quality espoused at each level. Convergence was shown in the critical influence of the economic tradition within education and the perceived role of schools in fostering resilient individuals and communities. Divergence was observed through the varying meanings assigned to similar concepts and the dissimilar influences of the humanistic and organisational management traditions at different levels. We discuss the implications of our findings for fostering collective efforts among key partners toward the achievement of quality education in Zambia.

KEYWORDS:

• Education quality
• policy coordination
• discourse analysis
• Zambia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Jeongmin Lee is a doctoral candidate of Comparative Education and International Development in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the Florida State University, USA. She is a qualified teacher and has multi-year fieldwork experiences related to basic education and child development in sub-Saharan Africa, including Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia. Jeongmin's current research interest focuses on the effect of socio-emotional support for children affected by poverty and disease as it relates to holistic approaches to quality basic education in low-income countries.

Stephanie Simmons Zuilkowski is an assistant professor of Comparative Education and International Development in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the Florida State University. The goal of her research agenda is to improve educational access and school completion rates in developing countries, with a particular focus on educational quality. Stephanie’s interdisciplinary research programme, drawing on education, child development, and public health, centres on three interrelated areas: educational access and achievement in sub-Saharan Africa, early childhood development in low-resource contexts, and relationships between health and educational outcomes.

Notes

1 Examples include researchers approaching these issues from sociocultural analysis (e.g. Sutton and Levinson 2001), historical studies (e.g. Rappleye 2015), anthropology (e.g. Anderson-Levitt 2003), and the policy borrowing and lending perspective (e.g. Steiner-Khamsi 2004).

2 See e.g. Barrett et al. (2006), Cheng and Cheung (1997), Cheng and Tam (1997), Kumar and Sarangapani (2004), Lockheed and Verspoor (1991); Nikel and Lowe (2010), Scheerens (2004), Tawil, Akkari, and Macedo (2011), Tikly (2011), and Tikly and Barrett (2007, 2011).

3 Barrett et al.’s (2006) quality categorisation also includes effectiveness, efficiency, and relevance. While labelled differently, these categories are similar to those presented in Cheng and Tam’s work (1997). Effectiveness reflects goals and specifications, efficiency is related to process, and relevance is similar to satisfaction.

4 Organisational learning focuses on the school’s adaptability to survive in a changing environment, whereas reflexivity captures education’s contribution to adaptability on the part of learners.