Recent years of educational planning and policy have seen a marked shift towards promoting quality of education. Scholars, policy-makers and practitioners have shown increasing interest in defining and assessing what makes learning relevant to the needs of individual students and wider society as well as effective in teaching enduring competence of literacy, numeracy and other basic skills. Teachers have rarely been included in the process of crafting such frameworks and the literature has largely ignored class analysis, though social class is a significant social division and determinant of educational access, experience and achievement. In this study, principals and teachers working in different class contexts were interviewed about their ideas and experiences of QoE using the Delors Report learning pillars as a guiding framework. Responses showed clear differences in implementation and conceptualization of student potential and needs depending on educators’ academic and occupational expectations of social class. Interview data was analyzed using a critical theory perspective, an approach that recognizes and analyzes class conflict and struggle in education. Jean Anyon’s work on classed stratification of knowledge is particularly useful in framing this analysis. Critical theory validates and responds to interviewees’ articulated goals of education, which were outlined in respondents’ humanistic educational perspectives but not meaningfully tackled.