Quality in primary education is currently high on the education agenda in developing countries. What is quality? How can we effectively measure it? How can we achieve it? How can we improve it? The author considers two suggestions to be critical to answering these above questions and engages with them in this article: (1) place what is happening in the school and classroom, specifically teaching and learning processes, at the top of the quality agenda; and (2) use lesson observation to answer the questions. The engagement in the article with the term "quality" highlights that six conceptualisations are used in the literature. However, the author argues that only two subsections of one of the conceptualisations are influencing policy, i.e. the input and output definitions of quality. An exploration of the common indicators of quality supports this and the author uses a political economy perspective to consider the reasons for it. This leads to the main section of the paper which seeks to explore the two suggestions above.