Stuart Cameron

I am an independent researcher and advisor on education and international development. I am interested in how education systems around the world can be made fairer and more inclusive as they expand. My expertise includes mixed methods research, evaluation of education programmes, urban poverty, policies on access and inclusion, school improvement programmes, and data analysis and visualization.

My work

... has been quite diverse, spanning international organizations, academia and consultancy since 2003. I have worked in Bangladesh, France, India, Italy, Nigeria, the UK and the US. Here is my CV. Some key areas I have worked on include:

'Leaving no one behind' and out-of-school children

Access to basic education in developing countries is sometimes seen as a solved problem. But in the lowest income countries, large numbers of children remain out of school or unable to complete even primary school. As of 2021, some 250 million children, adolescents and youth remain out of school. Dramatic progress was made in expanding educational opportunities between the 1990s and 2010, but since then, progress on access has slowed to a near halt. My work has asked what this means for international support from the Global Partnership for Education, and I supported UNICEF and UNESCO's Out-of-School Children Initiative in several countries across East Asia, the Pacific, the Middle East and North Africa. I was part of the UNESCO report team who wrote Reaching the Marginalized which examined barriers facing the most marginalized groups around the world and ways to overcome them.

Measuring equity and inclusion in education

It is increasingly important to understand the effects on equity of policy and programmes in education, yet there is little agreement on how best to do this. Evaluations often do not disaggregate impact except by gender. Data availability remains sparse for many marginalized groups, including children with disabilities. My work for the Global Partnership for Education has tracked the availability of disability-disaggregated education statistics, while work for the UNESCO Institute for Statistics has provided a conceptual framework for measuring equity in education.

Mixed-methods evaluations of teaching and learning programs

I led evaluations of the Teacher Development Programme and Education Sector Support Programme in Nigeria (ESSPIN), both major UK aid-funded school improvement programmes in Nigeria, and advised on several other such programs. These evaluations revealed how children in many areas were ending primary school without learning basic reading or mathematics skills. Teacher in-service training and better school management saw some success, with better teaching methods being used in classrooms, but weren't always able to overcome fundamental problems around language of instruction, teacher language skills, and low capacity to deal with children's diverse learning needs.

Education and urban poverty

People living in poverty and in cities remain a neglected group in many countries, affected by bad housing, high costs of education, dangerous journeys to school, and subtle forms of exclusion from local schools. As part of the Consortium for Research on Educational Access, Transitions and Equity (CREATE), for my doctoral research, and as a research fellow for UNICEF's Innocenti Office of Research, I worked with poor urban communities in Bangladesh to understand the barriers they were facing to accessing a good education.

Savings groups and education

Many international NGOs fund savings groups to try and give poor communities in developing countries better control over their financial resources. Together with Eric Ananga, University of Education, Winneba, I carried out a qualitative study for Plan International on how people in two communities in Ghana were using these groups to support their children's education.

Development Timelines

I use Python, Javascript, Stata and R to create tools and dashboards for data measurement, analysis, and visualization. Development Timelines is an app for visualizing international development indicators over time against the backdrop of historical events such as changes in education policy, financial crises, and conflict.

Bibliography

Links

Contact

stuartjcameron at outlook dot com