EdQUAL - A Paradigm to Measure Overall Quality in Education: Empirical Evidence from Vietnamese Lower Secondary Schools

“Quality in education” is an ambitious objective that every education entity or system wants to pursue, regardless of levels of governance, legislation, diversity of motivation, and approaches towards education. However, the alignment on how we should define quality in education has not been reached yet. That challenge in illustrating a portrait of quality education also makes it more difficult for school leaders and education system leaders to improve education quality. For hundreds of years, education systems worldwide witnessed the blooming of theories and practices to tackle this Gordian knot. To be dated, most of the recent approaches focus on the macro perspective of an education system and demand high-level technical skills to implement. Whilst there are limited well-known guidelines and practices for school leaders to capture the overall picture of contemporary quality issues at their schools for instant and continuous improvements. As a small puzzle to contribute to the fourth United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 4), this research proposes a framework to measure overall quality in education using a lean and rounded perspective, which can be adopted by any school, school district, or education system. Besides, using the data of 2,239 students’ expectations and perceptions about the quality in education, this paper also presents the empirical evidence of eight Vietnamese lower secondary schools as a case study.