Prof  Dr Jo Ritzen is an Honorary Professor at UNU-MERIT and Maastricht University. He served as Minister of Education, Culture, and Science of the Netherlands from 1989 to 1998, becoming the longest-serving Education Minister in the EU. Subsequently, he was appointed Vice-President of the World Bank (1998–2003) and President of Maastricht University (2003–2011). His current research interests revolve around trust in government and sustainability issues, and he is also leading an initiative to i...

We held the closing ceremony for our Master’s in Public Policy and Human Development (MPP) on 10 June 2021 to commemorate the past academic year and to celebrate the success of the cohort. After a year of COVID-19, this event brought many students and faculty together for the first time, and was a memorable event on many fronts. The event was moderated by Academic Programme Director Julieta Marotta and Professor Franziska Gassmann, and included talks from the MPP student ambassador, student gove...

Two professors and a Master’s alumna from UNU-MERIT have won the RWB Jackson Award 2021, for the most outstanding English-language article published in the Canadian Journal of Education. The award went to an article entitled, The Use of a Multidimensional Support Model to Examine Policies and Practices for Immigrant Students across Canada, co-authored by Louis Volante, Camila Lara, Melissa Siegel et al. The article sets out the urgent case for ministries and departments to develop a stand-alone ...

There is no doubt that COVID-19 has significantly impacted our lives, including schools and education. Temporary closures of school buildings have highlighted how factors outside school systems affect schools’ capacity to meet students’ needs and support academic achievement. For example, elementary schools can only successfully deliver online education if children have an adult or responsible caregiver with them or they have a reliable internet connection. There is a large body of research that...

Our ‘Dual Focus PhD’ series tracks the working lives of our part-time PhD fellows. Many work at the highest of levels, both nationally and internationally — and in normal times they come to Maastricht in person for our unique PhD Dual Career Training Programme in Governance and Policy Analysis (GPAC²). This time we catch up virtually with Gillian McFarland, who will shortly defend her thesis on ‘Doing policy in further education: An exploration of the enactment of the GCSE resit poli...

We are very happy to announce that Prof Kristof de Witte, our chair in Effectiveness and Efficiency of Educational Innovations, has been named Laureate of the Academy – Humanities 2020 by the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts. This is the academy’s most prestigious award and is only the second time that the award has gone to an economist. Kristof, who is based at KU Leuven across the border in Belgium, explains how: “As an educational economist, I examin...

Imagine being born in rural India. Imagine being Swapnali Sutar. You come top of your class in primary school and are able to enter secondary education. You work hard and your dream of becoming a veterinary doctor gradually seems possible. Until one day COVID-19 stops the world in its tracks. Your school and teachers are able to offer classes online, but your education and future remain at risk because your village has zero internet connectivity. This Indian girl managed to find a temporary work...

I am one of the latest people in a long line of around 130 years of continuous migration in my family – a privilege to which I owe many of my accomplishments. My mother is Iranian and my father is German. Although I was born in Germany, I was still a baby when my parents decided to migrate to Paraguay, where I grew up until the age of 11. After that, we moved to England, followed by another move to Zimbabwe, where we stayed for four years. Finally, we moved back to England, where I finished my h...

COVID-19 has brought a tsunami of change and impacted every facet and sector of society, including the lives of children, parents and teachers. UN Secretary-General António Guterres recently said that the coronavirus pandemic is the biggest global challenge since the Second World War. When K-12 schools will reopen in Canada remains an open question, and hope is quickly fading that students will be able to finish the 2019-20 academic year with face-to-face instruction. Ontario’s schools, for exam...

Girls consistently outperform boys on reading tests – and have done so for several decades around the world. Lack of motivation, a weak vocabulary, poor reading engagement and lack of role models have all been considered possible reasons for this disparity....