Findings indicated the effectiveness of peer tutoring in promoting significant gains in mathematics performance for both the tutor and the tutee, including with low achievers, mildly handicapped or socially disadvantaged children. Heller & Fantuzzo (1993) have demonstrated the effectiveness of combining peer tutoring with parent tutoring in mathematics with 10-11-year-old students (Topping, 2000: 21)

A  second  interpretation  of  the  concept  of  public  accountability  considers  that  all  potential  parents  of  a  school  are  its  public  and  that  they  all  have  the  right  to  be  informed  about  the  performances, the characteristics and the quality of all schools, so as to be able to choose the school most fitting for their kids. The scenario here is the one of a marketplace for schooling, which,  to  function  well,  needs  to  provide  the  public  with  relevant  information.  As  such,  several  countries  have  started  publishing  examination  results  by  schools  while  some  have  done  so  for  school  supervision  reports (De Grauwe, A. 2008: 11). 

De Grauwe, A. 2008. School monitoring systems and their impact on disparities. Paris: IIEP-UNESCO.

It was presumed -- or perhaps desired, wished or ordained -- that evaluations at each level would dictate reallocations of resources between activities, according to the marginal impact yield of the additional money spent. PPBS' rigorous hierarchical structure, its grounding in economics -- the key question was: Where is the marginal dollar most effective?” --, its faith in the inherent comparability of various policy purposes on the basis of expenditures, their common denominator; its promises of both control and fine tuning of all government actions, plus continuous feedback and monitoring; all combined into a vision of an ultimate fusion of budgeting and policy-making. The promised end result was to be a smoothly functioning machine, highly transparent and stable, yet capable of constant reallocations resulting from continuous and integrated evaluations of the impact of policies. (…) All real attempts to implement PPBS as a system were soon abandoned, without much tearshedding. The reasons for the demise of policy-making as top-down-budgeting embodied in PPBS (and later on in ZBB) are well known. The most obvious is the enormous information overload it inflicts on any system, since the evaluation and continuous reassessment of a very wide range of policies requires vast financial resources and, more importantly, consumes a great deal of decision-makers' time (OCDE, 1996: 32).

It requires that states admit refugees to post-compulsory education on conditions no less favourable than those applicable to aliens generally. The Protocols agreed in 1967 extend the coverage of the 1951 Convention worldwide (Sinclair, 2002: 35).

The narrow donor base for support to basic education and the skewing of aid towards post-secondary education contribute to the problem (UNESCO, 2010: 217).

In all OECD countries, adults with tertiary education earn considerably more than adults with below upper secondary education. Indeed, between 2000 and 2011, only in a few countries for which information is available for both years – Germany, Hungary and Switzerland – the earnings of adults with below upper secondary education have undergone some increase when compared with earnings of adults with upper secondary or post-secondary non-tertiary education (OECD, 2013: 101).

In Kazakhstan, pre-primary education classes prepare 5- or 6-year-olds who have never attended pre-school (especially in rural areas) for formal schooling through a 32-week crash course in school readiness. There is some concern that such classes focus too narrowly on academics kills; it is important to focus as well on children's emotional well-being, which is vital to their adjustment to primary schooling (Choi, 2006). France's lieux passerelles, ‘crossing places’ for children with no experience of early childhood activities outside the home, are designed to foster socialization with peers and transition from home to pre-school through structured activities and free play. Parents, often from poor, immigrant backgrounds, get staff support in separating from their children, meeting other parents, and taking a role in their children’s education (Neuman and Peer, 2002). Though the focus is on transition from home to the école maternelle (pre-school) –the first contact with the school system for many immigrant families – similar activities can be adapted to transition to primary school (UNESCO, 2006: 164).

UNESCO. 2007. Strong Foundations: Early Childhood Care and Education; EFA Global Monitoring Report, 2007. Paris: UNESCO.

Initial teacher education should be part of an integrated professional development model linked both to induction and mentoring at the beginning of a career and to ongoing professional development throughout a career. Initial teacher education is likely to be planned as part of a teacher recruitment strategy based on current needs (UNESCO, 2019:47).

UNESCO. 2019. Teacher Policy Development Guide. Paris: UNESCO.

An alternative view, while apparently different, is actually quite closely related. Analyses of labour market implications and the rate of return to schooling in developing countries suggest strongly that schooling is a very good investment. A year of schooling typically shows a 25-30 percent real rate of return. Such a return often looks noticeably better than other investment alternatives. At the same time, school completion rates in low-income countries are very low. These two facts do not go together. If it is such a high rate of return activity, why aren’t people taking advantage of those high returns? (Hanushek, 2005: 24). , In 2004, only 62.9 percent of the new entrants in P1 had the ‘correct’ age of 6-7 years. A total of 6.2 percent of the new entrants were between 10 and 12 years old. Boys appear to be more likely to enrol at an older age than girls. The 2002 census showed that over 80 per cent of persons aged 13 years were still attending primary school; the percentage of those aged 15 and over was still 7 percent (UBOS, 2006a). At the same time there has also been a significant under-age enrolment: 14.5 percent in 2004 (MoES-EMIS data, 2004). MoES, from its side, has accepted continued over-age enrolment in primary schools, to the extent that many 12-year-olds are still admitted into Primary 1. Though there are no data, it is very likely that a larger percentage of a Primary 1 cohort eventually completes primary school than official completion rates suggest (Hoppers, 2008: 33).

Slightly more than twenty million repeaters in primary education in Latin American countries (some 30 per cent of enrolments) implies that the annual cost of poor quality, in terms of repetition alone, is close to US$3.3 billion (Schiefelbein, 1991b), given that the average cost per primary school pupil is nearly US$161 (Schiefelbein, 1992: 28).

Schiefelbein, Ernesto. Redefining basic education for Latin America: lessons to be learned from the Colombian Escuela Nueva. Fundamentals of Educational Planning 42. Paris: UNESCO-IIEP, 1992.

All diagnoses of the situation of Latin American education indicate that as regards quality and equity the promises have not been kept. The studies have highlighted: the gap between public and private schools and the ensuing difference in achievement levels; high repetition rates; early dropout and low achievement among the poorest populations; over-centralization and a lack of school autonomy; poor working conditions for teachers and difficulties in attracting young people to the profession; learning programmes that do not ensure the acquisition of indispensable life skills; and, finally, insufficient funding (Vaillant, 2005: 36).

When teachers engage in private tutoring of their own students, the poorest students suffer most because their families cannot afford tutoring and their teacher is often spending less time covering the curriculum in the classroom (UNESCO, 2014: 303).

UNESCO. 2014. Teaching and learning: achieving quality for all; EFA global monitoring report, 2013-2014. Paris: UNESCO.

In other countries, private schools are a way to avoid integrating with public school students. In part, social cohesion may be maintained where private schools that accept public funds are under strict public regulations (as is the case in the Netherlands) (Belfield and Levin, 2003: 51).

As an example of a public examination system used in some EFA-FTI countries, the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), founded in 1952, conducts public examinations using "internationally accepted procedures" and "providing qualitative and reliable educational assessment" in Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, with a focus on school-leaving, university entrance and certificate examinations (UNESCO, 2009:28).

Bernard, J. 2009. Learning counts: An overview of approaches to understanding, assessing and improving the quality of education for all. Paris: UNESCO.

Many of the earliest studies of the rate of return to educational investment were designed to measure the contribution of education to economic growth and the widely publicized conclusions - that human capital contributes to economic growth just as surely as physical capital and that education is a profitable investment - were used by governments both in developing and advanced countries to justify increased public expenditure on education (Woodhall, 2004: 103).

Woodhall, M. 2004. Cost-benefit analysis in educational planning. Fundamentals of Educational Planning 80. Paris: UNESCO-IIEP.

Small schools from different villages were encouraged to come together voluntarily in order to adhere to minimum pupil/class ratios and provide the entire primary cycle (Giordano, 2008: 82).

Between 1999 and 2011, the pupil/teacher ratio in primary education increased by at least 20% in nine countries. By contrast, it fell by at least 20% in 60 countries. Congo, Ethiopia and Mali more than doubled primary school enrolment and yet decreased their pupil/teacher ratios by more than 10 pupils per teacher (UNESCO, 2014: 5).