1. Expanding and improving comprehensive early childhood care and education, especially for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children
2. Ensuring that by 2015 all children, particularly girls, children in difficult circumstances and those belonging to ethnic minorities, have access to and complete, free and compulsory primary education of good quality.
3. Ensuring that the learning needs of all young people and adults are met through equitable access to appropriate learning and life-skills programmes.
4. Achieving a 50 per cent improvement in levels of adult literacy by 2015, especially for women, and equitable access to basic and continuing education for all adults.
5. Eliminating gender disparities in primary and secondary education by 2005, and achieving gender equality in education by 2015, with a focus on ensuring girls’ full and equal access to and achievement in basic education of good quality.
6. Improving all aspects of the quality of education and ensuring excellence of all so that recognized and measurable learning outcomes are achieved by all, especially in literacy, numeracy and essential life skills.

With almost two thirds of the target time having passed since the Dakar summit in 2000, there is a lot more to do to achieve the 6 goals, out of which 3 specifically state `quality' as an important element. Major constraints experienced by developing countries in achieving the goals seem to be broad, and include causative factors such as insufficient budget allocation, shortage of well qualified teachers and lack of effective in-service teacher development opportunities.

I think that one of the best indicators of where we stand, as seen from the Dakar point of view, is a measure of how effective and child friendly are classroom processes. As all readers of this article would probably agree, quality of classroom processes is a function of how effectively a teacher guides his/her class.

Although there are numerous strategies and tools used to assess teacher performance in classrooms and redress the issues, many of these are not convenient enough to be used in today's classrooms, due to reasons such as large TPR (Teacher Pupil Ratio), shortage of trained professionals with specific inspection and monitoring skills etc. With such logistic difficulties in mind, I developed a simple Teacher Performance Appraisal Form that can be used in schools.

This format, as shown below, incorporates a wide range of attributes that are central to classroom processes (with teacher being viewed as catalyst of change) and can effectively be used on a regular basis. As in the case of most educational administration documents, the main aim of TPA is to bring about improvement in classroom processes and thereby contribute to quality enhancement.

Total score: ______

Printable format of the Form

I and my colleagues have been using the form to compare the performance of any teacher over a certain period of time or to compare performances of different teachers at any instant of time.

Besides this format, that is applicable to classrooms in general, I have had the pleasure of developing tools for use in diverse classroom situations.

TPA Form can help school systems to gear up their teacher development programs and achieve EFA within their communities at least, earlier than 2015.