Combining Educational Access and Educational Quality into a Single Statistic

The expansion of access to schooling in developing countries has been one of the most successful social movements in recent history. The proportion of people aged 15 and over, living in developing countries, that had no schooling halved between 1980 (38%) and 2010 (17%) (Barro & Lee, 2010, p. 32). Consequently, there has also been a drastic increase in the average years of schooling, rising from 4.3 years (1980) to 7.1 years (2010). Unfortunately, learning outcomes in many of these countries can only be described as dismal. When taken together, these two outcomes prompt the question: “What is the purpose of expanding access to formal schooling?” Is it to increase the number of children frequenting a building called a “school”, or is it to increase the number of students acquiring the knowledge, skills and values they need to participate in modern society? If it is the latter, then that is what we should measure. Recent scholarship has started to draw attention to the increasing disconnect between schooling (access) and learning (quality). A sequential analysis of the access-to-education literature, and subsequent policy dialogues, shows an important development in the thinking of educational researchers. What started out as an almost single-minded focus on access, ‘Education For All’, has slowly developed into a more nuanced concept of quality education for all (UNESCO, 2005; Lewin, 2007). As more and more countries approach universal enrolment, there is a shift away from simplistic measures of access to schooling and towards a fuller concept of access to learning. Although the method and data used here will be discussed at length below, Figure 1 provides an illustration of such an attempt at combining measures of access and quality for three different countries: Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa. From the graphs one can see that the three different countries face different problems. In Tanzania initial enrolment is particularly low whereas in Uganda where low initial enrolment is less of a problem, dropout between grade 1 and grade 6 is unusually high. In South Africa – where initial access is high and dropout low, there are large proportions of children that are in school in grade 6 but remain functionally illiterate. Clearly there are country-specific differences with respect to both access and quality.