The Sustainable Development Goals emphasise the importance of ‘inclusive and equitable quality education’. Yet children from poor households and, amongst these, girls and children with disabilities in particular, continue to be least likely to achieve basic learning outcomes. This symposium will seek to identify key barriers to equitable teaching and learning in India and Pakistan with the aim of seeking solutions to the learning crisis in these countries.
The focus of the symposium on India and Pakistan is of particular relevance given the commitment in both countries to the Right to Education. In India, this has been accompanied by a rapid expansion in access in recent years but without an analogous improvement in learning, while Pakistan continues to lag behind in both access and learning.
The symposium includes three papers from an on-going research project on Teaching Effectively All Children (TEACh) funded by ESRC and DFID. The study is based on new data collected at both the household as well as the school level to examine inequality in both access as well as quality of schooling. Discussants from DFID and a disability NGO will provide their critical reflections on the evidence from their perspective of educational programming and advocacy.
The first presentation seeks to identify within and across school differences in the quality of teachers to investigate the main barriers to equitable teaching and learning. Using a sample of 500 students enrolled in government schools in randomly selected villages from Punjab, Pakistan, it estimates a multivariate model to identify sources of inequitable outcomes.It then discusses whether differences in achievement of marginalised children (such as based on gender, poverty and disability) are due to these children being clustered in particular schools or due to differences in teaching within the schools they attend.
In the context of recent policy efforts to improve learning levels in Haryana, India, the second paper draws on teacher interviews and classroom observations to gain insights into both teacher perspectives towards learner diversity in the classroom, and teaching in practice. The presentation is based on in-depth research in 6 schools in 3 districts in Haryana, with the aim of highlighting the positive efforts to provide equitable teaching and learning, and the challenges involved.
The third paper puts the spotlight on a group of children who have been systematically excluded from learning assessments, namely children with disabilities. There are two key reasons for their exclusion: first because they remain invisible in assessment data; and secondly because the forms of assessment exclude many of them. This paper presents evidence from our research in India and Pakistan on new approaches to identifying children with disabilities in conventional learning assessments with the aim of showing comparisons in learning of children with different types of disabilities with those without disabilities. It further highlights that conventional approaches to literacy and numeracy excludes some children, and provides insights from our research on alternative ways in which learning assessments can be designed for inclusion.
Paper 1:Examining Inequitable Access to Teaching and Learning for Marginalized Groups: Evidence from Pakistan
Monazza Aslam, Faisal Bari, Shenila Rawal, Rabea Malik, Fizza Raza, Pauline Rose and Anna Vignoles
Paper 2: Moving towards equitable teaching and learning in primary schools in Haryana, India: Insights from a field study
Meera Samson, Kirthi V. Rao, Nidhi Singal and Matthew Somerville
Paper 3: Assessing learning for inclusion of children with disabilities: Lessons for international development settings
Anuradha De, Rabea Malik, Pauline Rose, Nidhi Singal and Matthew Somerville
Discussant: Edward Davis, DFID Pakistan
