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....
One standardised assessment tool has become the key benchmark for national governments to judge their schools’ successes. But the academic rankings generated by the Program in International Student Assessment (PISA) are eclipsing important questions such as how particular groups of students are doing in school or graduation rates....
There are many challenges that can arise when collecting data in developing countries: from heavy rain that stops your data collection for a few days, to arriving at a remote school in your sample just to find out that it is closed for the day due to some local festivities, to challenges in recruiting the right pool of capable enumerators. It is important to start with a well-developed plan for your data collection – but one that has wiggle-room or flexibility to adjust to unforeseen situations....
A new book on ‘Socio-economic inequality and education outcomes’ by Prof. Louis Volante shows that while it is possible to raise disadvantaged children’s academic achievement, socio-economic education gaps are still high and in many countries increasing. Much more needs to be done to help students from lower socio-economic backgrounds to succeed. Download the policy brief here The book discusses how relevant education policies have evolved and evaluates across countries how suc...