Stud Philos Educ (2009) 28:415424

DOI 10.1007/s11217-009-9125-7

What is Equity in Education? Reflections

from the Capability Approach
Elaine Unterhalter

Published online: 30 January 2009

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract While there is a substantial conceptual literature on equality in education, there

has been little clarificatory discussion on the term equity, despite its frequent use in policy
and planning documents. The article draws out some different ways in which equity can be
understood in education. It distinguishes three forms of equity, looking at the social context
when major shifts in the meaning of the term took place in Englishthe fourteenth
century, the sixteenth century and the eighteenth century. Terming these equity from
below, equity from above, and equity from the middle, the analysis highlights how each
helps clarify aspects of the concern with diversity within the capability approach. The
conclusion drawn is that all three forms of equity need to be placed in articulation to
expand capabilities in education.
Keywords
Kenya

Equality
Capability approach
Equity
Institutions
South Africa

What is equity in education? A well developed literature has expanded our understandings
of equality in education considering how to interpret the ideal of respect for all in schools,
while taking account of differences between children, the gap between children and adults,
the significance of cultural and social relations, and the dynamic of family life (e.g.
Brighouse 2000; Lynch and Lodge 2002; Swift 2003; Eisenberg 2006; Gereluk 2006;
Walker 2006; Terzi 2008). However there is less conceptual writing on the nature of equity
in education.
Equity appears more frequently than equality in policy texts. For example the World
Declaration on Education for All (1990) expresses its vision as universalising access and
promoting equity (World Declaration 1990, p. 4) but does not define equity. Equity is
frequently used in national policy documents. For example the vision statement for economic, social and political development in Kenya Kenya Vision 2030, formulated by the
E. Unterhalter (&)
Institute of Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, UK
e-mail: E.Unterhalter@ioe.ac.uk

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government through a consultative process in 20062007, has as one of its goals Equity
and poverty elimination but no definition of equity is given (Kenya 2007, 17). Equity is
first among the four goals for the partnership between the Kenyan government and large
multilateral and bilateral donors to support the education sector ensuring equity of access
to basic education (Kenya Ministry of Education 2005) but no definition of equity is
provided. Similarly the South African Eastern Cape Provincial Minister of Education
outlining plans to retrain under qualified teachers and open adult basic education centres in
2002 set these measures as instances of responding to key challenges the culture of human
rights, democracy and equity but did not explain the connections further (Eastern Cape
Provincial Government 2002)These underspecified definitions make understanding the
normative assumptions of equity difficult and this has consequences for implementation.
The standard definition of equity is the quality of being equal and fair and that which
is fair and right (Oxford English Dictionary 2007). Equity might thus be thought of as
equality turned into an action, a process of making equal and fair. But the academic
literature which uses the term equity in education does not stress this active dimension
separating equity from equality, but concentrates primarily on fairness in distribution,
collapsing equity into aspects of equality. For example, Fiske and Ladd (2004) writing
about South Africa define equity as comprising equal treatment for all races, equal educational opportunity and educational adequacy. Smith and Gorard (2006) see equity partly
as the quality of being just and fair and. partly as the process that supplies the underlying
principles as to why a system is fair. It is not clear from this discussion why equity is
preferable to equality in providing this grounding for fairness. Seeing equity primarily as
fair distribution opens these discussions to the critique posed by Sen (1992) regarding what
the metric of interpersonal comparison in discussions of equality is to be. Are inputs and
resources or outcomes to be fairly distributed and is equal distribution fair? Personal
heterogeneity in social and historical attributes and conditions and differences regarding
conceptions of the good have enormous significance for how we think about why people
learn, what is selected for learning and how learning is organised and progresses. This
diversity complicates the idea of fairness and without specifying how diversity intersects
with equity the term risks becoming either merely rhetorical or impossibly difficult to
implement.
This paper attempts to bring together two themes. Firstly, an examination of the historical evolution of the concept of equity in English, the language used in many of the key
policy documents that use the term. Through this I draw out what some different elements of
historical ideas about fairness might mean in education. It looks at these different forms of
equity for the light they throw on the ways in which Sen enjoins us to think about equality in
the space of capabilities. Sens capability approach makes the argument that the metric of
interpersonal comparison needs to take human diversity as a central concern (Sen 1992).
Capabilities, which represent the freedoms to achieve combinations of valued functionings
are real alternatives to formulate and achieve wellbeing. Capabilities are thus responsive to
heterogeneities which are central, not incidental to the ways in which equality is conceived
(Sen 1999). In looking at different emphases within the idea of equity I want to draw out
how these might help delineate forms of social arrangement which, given a range of human
heterogeneity, can shape expansion of a capability set. In so doing equity works in particular
ways to establish conditions for consideration of equality in the space of capabilities.
To make this analysis I draw on methods suggested by Raymond Williams in Keywords
for exploring changing formations of meaning of many of our central experiences
(Williams 1975, p. 13) Williams dealt with shifts in the meaning of equality, but did not
discuss equity, suggesting possibly this was not the puzzling and contested term in the mid

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1970s it is today. Following Williams I examine some shifts in the meaning of equity in
English. I connect these with political, economic and social changes in Britain. I then give
examples of different forms of equity in education associated with selected postcolonial
processes in order to indicate how widespread actions of equity in education have been.
The term equity appears in English in three different guises associated with three very
different forms of social relationships. One of the earliest uses of the term (c.1374) appears
in the writings of John Wycliffe in his translation of the Bible from Greek and Latin to
English, thereby making it more widely available. In translating the Book of Malachai, the
last book of the Old Testament in 1382 Wycliffe used the word equity to mean reasonableness between people, a quality of avoiding insisting on ones own rights or views too
vigorously. As listed in the Oxford English Dictionary the phrase he used was In equitee
he walkide with me (Oxford English Dictionary 2007) At about the same time Chaucer
expanded the sense of equity to take in the idea of fairness and justice between people. In
his translation of the work of the sixth century Platonist scholar Boethius, De Consolatione
Philosophiae into English completed about 1374 Chaucer used the term as follows:
Amonges bise binges sitte e heye makere..to don equite. (IV. vi. 144 quoted in Oxford
English Dictionary 2007). The middle English is rendered in contemporary English as
Amongst these things sits the high maker [i.e. God] to do [them] equity. Equity is thus a
virtue you do and perform; it entails God sitting amongst all He has created, treating them
equally. I would like to term this form of equity, equity from below, because it is a way of
thinking about equity that is associated with a belief about peoples access to powerful
knowledgethe Bible or philosophy or nearness to Godthe importance of everyday
relations of respecting each other, whatever our differences. In this guise equity says
something about a form of conduct people value on an everyday basis between themselves,
and the process of establishing this is one of fairness and tolerance.
Thus in this meaning equity in education entails some acceptance of a space of negotiation in which particular concerns of groups or individuals on say curriculum content or
the form of assessment or the treatment of girls and boys or the approach to management
are negotiated not on the basis of majority rule, or the intensity of one persons view with
regard to another, but through a process of reasonableness and reflection that considers
each person participating in the discussion has a valuable opinion, but what is most valued
is the process of establishing the considerate and fair relationships that support negotiation,
questioning and discussion. Equity from below seems to align with the emphasis in the
capability approach on agency and process freedoms and in Sens interest in deliberative
democracy (Sen 2005). My conjecture is that social conditions that foster equity from
below would also support the development of agency and process freedoms in education
for diverse individuals and thus enhance the range of real alternatives very heterogenous
people can consider for themselves and others in expanding a capability set.
Here is an example of equity from below in education depicted in the relationships to
support learning associated with an anti-colonial struggle marked by considerable differences of view. Stanley Mabizela, active in the ANC Youth League in the Eastern Cape in
the 1950s, recalled some experiences 40 years later:
We did query the policy of non-racialism. We were young and we said why cant we
fight and drive them away? But our elders in the organisation were very patient
people. They told us the history of the ANC and took pains to explain why the ANC
must be non-racial. It was something which was not very easy to accept at the
beginning, because of immaturity, because of youthfulness. We would tell our
seniors that we dont agree with the policy; but this was a topic that was handled so

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many times that gradually you got to understand the reasoning behind it: that first and
foremost whites in South Africa came over three hundred years ago and they now
have nowhere to go. Secondlyand this is the stressed point in the ANCwhites are
human beings like ourselves except that they have got the wrong ideology in their
heads. And with time they will change and we will stay with them as brothers and
sisters, as our fellow human beings (quoted in Frederikse 1990, p. 27)
Although this example of equity from below is not in a school, but in the discussions
taking place in a political movement, it does exemplify the sense of people working
together through their differences, even when, as under apartheid, these were profound and
the effects are hugely destructive. We have a sense that the process of discussion and
participation in debate goes toward establishing fairness. We also have some nuance
regarding the ways in which agency freedom is constituted socially. The enlargement of
capabilities through this form of equity expressed Mabizelas reflective assessment of what
was important, his values entailed changing ideas about racism and establishing a community of equals in South Africa.
Equity from below thus takes seriously aspects of personal heterogeneity both in circumstances and in conceptions of a good life, as this second example makes clear. During a
seminar in Bangladesh in 2004 I visited an adolescent girls centre run by the large
education NGO BRAC. I was with a party of women from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India,
Denmark and UK. Initially the girls talked dutifully about what they did in the centre,
politely answering questions. Then one of them took courage and asked us about ourselves.
Which of us had children, what had led some to decide not to marry. If we had young
children, how did we reconcile our work and family. The discussion turned from stilted to
heated in about 2 minutes. It went on for more than an hour. There were many different
points of view and no conclusion. Here I think was a measure of equity from below. The
boundaries between older and younger adults and people from different societies were
being negotiated. In these reflections a range of possibilities about the nature of a good life
were being explored.
Equity from below in this form is not unknown or impractical in schools. McCowans
(2008, 2009 forthcoming) analysis of discussions with children and teachers working in the
schools of the Brazilian Landless Peoples Movement and the Plural School contain many
instances of the curricular transposition of equity from below. However he also highlights
how fragile and difficult to sustain such initiatives are in school settings. Thus expanding a
capability set through forms of equity in schools requires enormous attention to the process
of curricular transposition, discussion with and support for teachers, and particular attention to issues of management and infrastructure. Equity from below, possibly because it
works with everyday social relations, is not natural; expanding a capability set for the
very diverse groups that work together in a school demands considerable understanding
and reflection to sustain the agency and process freedoms. But while these are necessary,
they are not sufficient.
The problem of sustainability highlights a second aspect of equity evident in the
meaning of the word which came into English in the sixteenth century. During a period of
struggles over authority between the King and the Church equity came to mean a form of
law making, an appeal to natural justice or a reasoned set of laws above the existing and
contending centres of power and juridical authority. This meaning was first mentioned in
English in 1574 in a translation of Thomas Littletons work on forms of land tenure,
originally written in French in c.1481. The English translation of this work during the reign
of Elizabeth 1 rendered into English for the first time the notion of equity law. Littleton

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referred to equity law as a particular form of regulation of land holding They bee taken by
the equitie of the statute (Oxford English Dictionary 2007). From the late fifteenth century
equity laws which dealt with legal matters appropriate neither to the courts of the Church
or the Crown came to be codified and special courts of equity were established. I would
like to term this equity from above because it was a form of regulating actions according
to rules, guided by reason and later by ideas of rights and fairness that could be recognised
in a particularly powerful kind of court.
This meaning of equity in education indicates that there are rules that have been decided
as fair and reasonable by some widely recognised body of opinion. Issues for regulation in
this way might be how many years of instruction constitute an acceptable level of education that provides lives of value for all children across widely differing contexts. Another
might be what level of pay should be awarded to teachers relative to the median wage of a
country. Seeing equity in terms of reasoned (and potentially revisable) rules implies
children or teachers would have rights to have this level of schooling or pay granted to
them. Some body therefore carries the obligation to satisfy these rights and to put in place
procedures for ensuring their delivery in diverse contexts. Equity from above and the
appeal to rules and notions of public good resonates with the concerns in the capability
approach with instituting conditions for positive freedoms (Vizard 2006; Deneulin et al.
2006). It also helps illuminate the ways in which Sen and Rawls have written about
capabilities being incorporated within the remit of the principles and processes outlined in
A theory of justice (Robeyns 2009). The authority for equity from above would come in
Rawls analysis from the social contract made in the original position and the exercise of
the two moral powersa capacity for a sense of justice and a capacity for a conception of
the good. Other views of the rules that assure capabilities point to processes of participatory discussion and ethical rationality (Alkire 2002) or assuring forms of public good
(Deneulin 2006) or following procedures to ensure multiple assessments are taken into
account (Robeyns 2006). In all these accounts the rules of fairness are established partly
because of personal heterogeneity. It thus seems that the rules of equity which shape the
process and agency freedoms associated with the expansion of a capability set are particularly compelling given diverse ideas concerning the nature and value of education.
Here are some examples of equity from above. The South African Constitution guarantees all children a right to education and to be treated with dignity. The South African
Schools Act (1996) specifies that corporal punishment in schools violates dignity and the
rights of children not to be treated in a cruel and inhuman way. In 2000 the Constitutional
Court responded to a challenge to this law by a group of 196 Christian independent
schools. They argued the law violated the views of their community on the importance of
corporal punishment. The court ruled that the limitation placed on the values held by
members of these churches was justified. It was important to establish norms and standards
in all schools consonant with the values of the Constitution on human dignity. Parents had
a right to administer corporal punishment in their homes, if this was enjoined by their
religious beliefs. But they were not justified in requesting this of teachers, who were
employed to ensure fairness in all publicly funded schools. (South African Constitutional
Court 2000)
This example of equity from above concerns a national jurisdiction and the processes
of its parliament and courts. I want to give two more examples of equity from above that
show it operating in relation to units of justice that are both larger and smaller than a nation
state. In India the womens empowerment movement, Mahila Samakhya, established in the
1990s, worked with a large government programme to expand education provision, the
District Primary Education Programme (DPEP). In research I conducted with Shushmitta

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Dutt looking at Mahila Samakhya in Bihar we saw how at district level the location of
Mahila Samakhya close to a powerful body like DPEP associated with the law and the
administrative apparatus achieved some significant gains. Mahila Samakhya was able to
secure the right for low caste women to walk down the streets demanding education rights,
to sit in public places that had previously been barred to them and to gain access to jobs as
cooks or cleaners in teacher development centres that might not have been available to
such very poor women (Unterhalter and Dutt 2001). I do not want to underplay the
difficulty of the day-to-day working relationships of organisations with very different
remits, but I do want to point to the way in which laws and administrative regulation
institutes forms of equity. Equity from above in this example was about ensuring laws
about fair access and participation which could expand a capability set were adhered to
across profound differences of gender, class and caste.
Equity from above may also operate above the nation state though, here the process is
not likely to have the juridical weight of statutes and Constitutional guarantees. Discussions of global social justice point to its potential as a counterweight to the rampant growth
of global corporations often operating with little heed for the rights of people or the effects
on the environment (Held 2004; Mandle 2006; Nussbaum 2006). The legal requirements
laid down by the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the
Elimination of Discrimination against Women are examples of equity from above associated with globalnational relations. While many countries opt out of the clauses of these
conventions that are considered too demanding or in contradiction with national customs, I
think they point interestingly to the possibilities for thinking about a Convention on
Education for All (EFA). This raises the question of whether it is feasible or desirable to
establish global mechanisms for equity relating to the provision of education of quality
with some of the same clout as those that apply to the strictures associated with the World
Trade Organisation or the International Criminal Court. In Gender, schooling and global
social justice I tried to conceptualise how institutionalising an approach like this that drew
on a vocabulary of rights would need to be supplemented by concerns with needs and
capabilities that took account of minimum levels of necessary provision of education on
the one hand (responding to needs) and the complexity of human diversity and the intricacies of agency (responding to capabilities) on the other (Unterhalter 2007). In thinking
about education globally through the concept of equity from above and the expansion of
capabilities at the supra-national level one has to take into account many layers of heterogeneity, but the notion that it would be possible to establish principles of fairness that
expand capabilities is very appealing.
A third meaning of equity is associated with the emergence of capitalism and the social
changes that came about as money came to play a central part in economic and social life
in Britain. First used in the eighteenth century (c.1712) this meaning of equity is associated
with finance and a process of redeeming money or making investments. Thomas Arbuthnot, in satirising the activities of the archetypical, honest plain-dealing, but short
tempered Englishman John Bull, wrote a sardonic tale about the tangled law suits of the
gentry describing the comic figure Esquire South and questioning whether he had the
equity of redemption in relation to land he had mortgaged (quoted in Oxford English
Dictionary 2007). By this form of equity Arbuthnot meant a process through which a
mortgagor, who had forfeited his estate, might redeem it within a reasonable time by
payment of the principal and interest (ibid). Equity is thus a form of share or ownership,
but its value is given not by intrinsic worth or a fixed rate of interest, but by the prevailing
social arrangements of the market. I would like to term this equity from the middle to draw
out the sense in which social arrangements mediate flows of value in education.

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Equity from the middle in education is associated with the movement of ideas, time,
money, skill, organization or artefacts that facilitates investments in the learning of
children or adults and the professional development of teachers. Just as money or equity
stock is not in itself valuable without attendant social arrangements that confer worth,
equity from the middlebe it for example forms of teacher training, or user fees, or modes
of school transportis not in itself fair or just without an articulation with equity from
below and equity from above. Thus the older meanings of equity as regulation (equity from
above) and as participation among equals (equity from below) confer on the new word
(equity from the middle) a sense that the social arrangements that make up the market-like
flows that facilitate education and learning must be fair. In expanding a capability set they
would need to be attentive to redistribution, particularly when forms of diversity and their
history entail discrimination. Just giving equal shares of time or money will not mitigate
the unfairness of existing social arrangements with regard to education, in the many
societies where the consequences of the past are written in the present. But the ways in
which a capability set expands are not laid down by absolute notions about justice or worth
or naturally achieved through discussion and dialogue. The process itself has a particular
character.
Equity from the middle might be associated with practices that set fair limits on educational capabilities. Richardson (2007) has drawn attention to the question of establishing
limits on the range of capabilities from which an individual can choose and Sen (2008) has
criticised what he calls transcendant views of justice, preferring those that can help rank
one set of choice above another. Equity from the middle in education might be processes
that enable these limits and forms of ranking to take place fairly.
In a research project with colleagues working for the Ministry of Education in Kenya we
tried to assess how changes in the KCPE examination (a national exam taken at the end of
the primary cycle) related to statistical data on the poverty of certain districts (Yates et al.
2007). We were looking at the distribution of instructional materials and teacher training in
very different regions with different levels of wealth and poverty and different social
conditions for girls and boys. This equity from the middle, associated with these flows of
education resources, is often termed efficiency. However we were not only interested in
whether or not training or textbooks had been delivered, but the extent to which their
circulation was redistributive to the poorest children and subject to discussion by school
committees in which the poorest parents could participate. We were thus concerned to
chart the ways in which equity from the middle articulated with equity from above, that is
some rules regarding the provision of quality education to all children in Kenya, and equity
from below, which would ensure the participation of community discussion of that education that would include even the poorest parents. Provision of equity from the middle
(instructional materials and teacher training) was thus necessary but not sufficient for an
expansion of educational capabilities for children in diverse regions of Kenya. But the
assessment of equity from the middle allowed us to make some judgements about equity
from above and below.
All the three forms of equity I have distinguished are important in order to expand
capabilities in education and assess equality, given human diversity. Equity from below
which entails dialogue and discussion about the expansion of a capability set across many
different points of view cannot be sustained without an architecture of regulations and laws
associated with equity from above. But without the flows of ideas, skill, material resources,
and time which substantively expand the capability set and are associated with equity in
the middle no education is delivered. Equity from above without a specification of the
nature and indeed the limits on resources and capabilities associated with equity in the

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middle, and the tolerance and respect and fairness associated with equity from below, is
likely to become hollow rhetoric. Equity from the middle, without the connection to
reasoned legal frameworks associated with equity from above and participation, dialogue
and critique associated with equity from below is likely to become a sterile managerialism.
Distinguishing different forms of equity highlights a number of process that complement each other in expanding a capability set. From the bottom it is important to look at
agency, from the top to look at rules and institutions that frame negative and positive
freedoms linked to a theory of justice, and from the middle to ensure flows of resources, a
dynamic between ideas and values that is attentive to limits and judgements, but not just
meagrely constrained by these assessments.
How can we operationalise equity and equality of capabilities in ways that are useful to
education planners? A 6-year study in a secondary school in a poor township in Durban
shows some of the ways in which equity works, but is also very difficult to implement
(Moletsane et al. 2002; Morrell et al. (2009, forthcoming). In the first years of the study
teachers and learners talked of AIDs as far away, mentioned in connection with distant
relatives or pupils who had long left. Gender hierarchies seemed entrenched. Girls were
described with derision and women teachers did not talk confidently in staff meetings. By
the end of the study much had changed. Teachers and children talked about gender in many
settings. The headmaster was immensely proud of the work of the older women guidance
teachers. An AIDs awareness day, organised by the student representative council, had
resulted in murals painted in the centre of the school. Children talked about what they did
to support friends with AIDs. However, there were still assumptions about how girls should
be moral and many advocates of compulsory virginity testing. However a number of girls
talked about making up their own minds on these issues. Despite many difficulties, which
included lack of infrastructure and young peoples difficulty in gaining access to work or
higher education after school, elements were evident of the school community working
towards expanding capabilities and negotiating diversity equitably.
The school would have found it enormously difficult to build these kinds of relationships if it had not had recourse to equity from above, from the middle and from below. The
South African Constitution guarantees all children the right to education and the provincial
ministry has reasonably fair mechanisms for teacher deployment. Thus, because of equity
from above, children from the poorest households were not being denied access to education or failing to progress because of a lack of resource. There was a flow of information
and training packages to teachers and learners concerning gender equality, AIDs awareness, health and rights representing equity from the middle. Their value was enhanced
because of the legislation on fair admission and progression (equity from above) and the
opportunities for critique and discussion (equity from below). Conditions had been
established in the school for equity from below where teachers and learners with very
different views about gender, the AIDs epidemic, politics and economics in South Africa
could talk and listen to each other. I do not want to romanticise this school as all who
worked there also talked about many problems, but I do want to point out how these
intersecting forms of equity contributed to expanding the capability space allowing for
combinations of valuable objectives by diverse actors.
This paper has distinguished different ways of thinking about equity in education and
considered how these might support the expansion of a capability set and contribute to
equalising capabilities in education. In so doing it has attempted to begin to point to
connections between the idea of equity, ubiquitous in the education policy vocabulary, and
more normative discussions of equality and capability. The analysis has thus associated
equity with particular forms of social arrangement which support the freedoms and forms

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of equality associated with capabilities. The discussion has thus attempted to reposition the
term equity detaching it from an evasion of a connection with equality, which some of the
unspecified policy language seems to suggest. In defining equity in education using shifting
historical contexts the analysis has sought to lay out how a substantive link between equity
and equality in the space of capabilities might be explored.
Acknowledgements This article develops an argument first presented in a keynote address to the conference Systemic Interventions in School Transformation: Comparative experiences, best practices, future
perspectives, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University Conference Centre, Port Elizabeth, June 2007. I am
grateful to the conference organisers who invited me to think about these issues and to all who made
comments on the lecture and the subsequent seminar paper delivered to the Philosophy of Education seminar
series at the Institute of Education, University of London in May 2008. The analysis has benefited considerably from suggestions from the journal referees and Geoff Hinchliffe in preparing the work for
publication. Thanks to Joe Crawford, Sophia Crawford and Helen Poulsen for research assistance.

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