Quality education: a school perspective.

Abstract

The South African schooling system has been in a constant state of transition. This has involved the significant shift from apartheid to post-apartheid education. Furthermore, the latter has also incorporated various curricular changes in an attempt to determine an improvement in the standard of education. This study focuses on understanding the notion of quality education: perspective from a school and how does a school promote quality education. This is done by using the following instruments: descriptive essays, semi-structured interviews as a means to generate rich, thick data required for the understanding of teachers’ feelings and experiences in promoting quality education. A case study approach within a qualitative design was employed. Five teachers were selected and deemed appropriate for this study. In this regard the case study was Marvel Primary School, which is an urban primary school situated in KwaZulu-Natal. The findings generated from the five experienced teachers were analysed and represented within the context of the teachers’ teaching experiences, the school context and the prescript of the CAPS policy framework. The findings offer an understanding of how these teachers take into account the promotion of quality education to their learners and how this shapes teaching and learning in their respective classrooms. In 2007, Cohen, Manion and Mannison, provided a framework – research design, a process to achieve a particular research purpose thereby incorporating an understanding of how teachers mediate the various forces that operate within a schooling system and has emphasised the need for teachers to be more autonomous professionals within this force field. The findings reveal in this research study, that notions of quality are consistent with literature such that they are not able to clearly express what quality education means to them. The evidence from the data generated reveals that various stakeholders in school education have their own perspectives of what quality education is. Teachers in this study have revealed and expressed that. These findings were extended to form key findings of the study. The key findings are discussed and explained using appropriate constructs from the theoretical frameworks of Akoi and Pinar. This dissertation concludes with a brief summary of the major conclusions that can be drawn from the study, and offers recommendations in light of the conclusions drawn.