Improving Quality of Education Along With Increasing Access to Education: Taking Both Steps Forward

Abstract

The post 2015 development agenda seeks to put equal focus on quality of education and access to education. But in a developing country like Pakistan, which failed to achieve the education targets of Millennium Development Goals, it has become quite challenging to focus on the new development targets in tandem with the efforts being made to pursue already missed out targets. It is quite likely that the sense of disappointment at failure to achieve MDG targets will first skew the attention of policy makers towards accomplishment of missed out targets and after that they would divert their energies towards SDG target of improved quality of education. The current enthusiasm of national and provincial governments to enrol more and more students further aggravates the likelihood of quality of education being put to the back burner. But ignoring either one of both at the expense of other would lead us nowhere as we would be taking one step forward and one step backward. This policy paper aims to identify the factors affecting the students learning outcomes and propose the relevant policy actions for improving quality of education.