Egypt has long promised quality basic education. Nevertheless, international and national assessments show poor reading skills. Community schools (CS) are a component of Egypt's Education for All strategy. CS were intended to offer quality education to children who otherwise would have no chance to complete primary school. Previous studies report…

Making decisions about English reading instruction is as core a component to teaching as providing the instruction itself. When providing support to learners at risk for poor reading outcomes, for which currently there is a large percentage in South Africa, it is especially important to ensure that the decisions that are made have the highest…

Promoting equal access to schools for researchers wishing to conduct educational research was one of the key tasks embedded in the educational transformation mandate of the new government of South Africa when it came to power in 1994. Drawing on data from five different research projects, this paper evaluates progress made by the democratic…

South Africa participated in the electronic version of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (ePIRLS) in 2016 but faced many challenges during implementation. Accurate databases on information and communication technologies (ICT) capacity of schools were not available for sampling in Gauteng, many schools had old and/or…

While expectations are high for early childhood education to support students' reading literacy, research findings are inconclusive. The purpose of the study is to estimate the effect of preschool non-participation on reading literacy at the end of primary school. That is, what is the average achievement of children who did not attend preschool…

Background: Political devolution occurred in the UK in 1998-99, following many years in which some degree of policy administration had been devolved to the four nations. Since devolution, all four countries of the UK have pursued increasingly divergent education policies. This is true in England in particular, where diversity, choice and…

The gender gap has been a hotly debated issue, both nationally and internationally. In 2000, the then Department for Education and Schools commissioned a four-year study into raising boys' achievement. The commission worked with over 60 primary, secondary and special schools in England to identify and evaluate the strategies highlighted to be…