Teaching and learning for all? The quality imperative revisited

The 2014 EFA Global Monitoring Report (GMR) is the second with 'quality' in its title but the only one in the series whose title explicitly highlights teaching and learning. While GMR 2014 assesses progress towards the six EFA goals with particular reference to the quality of teachers and teaching, this paper considers progress within the methodology of the monitoring process itself. EFA indicators can attend to only a limited range of variables, and proxies are inevitable. Yet with the post-2015 EFA agenda in view it is essential to ask whether what is truly transformative in teaching and learning has been adequately captured in the EFA monitoring process, the literature on which it has drawn, and the recommendations it has produced. The paper argues for a more radical and creative approach to the defining and use of indicators and argues that despite pedagogy's pivotal role in generating educational quality, it remains the missing GMR ingredient. The problem is both conceptual and evidential, and the paper argues for a more inclusive, less top-down use of the available research in order to bring into EFA and GMR discourse evidence on teaching and learning that can really make a difference.