Life-wide Learning: Supporting All Children to Enjoy Quality Education

For over twenty years, major investments in learning have focused on infrastructure and opportunities to learn formally in school. These investments, however, have had mixed results in terms of learning and equity. Through its evidence-based programming, Save the Children has identified five elements of disparity: gender, language, socioeconomic status, home literacy environment, and experiences in early childhood programmes. This paper explores how evaluation data allowed not only the exploration of impact across commonly discussed equity categories of gender and language but also how across the further essential categories of home literacy environment and participation in ECD programmes.

We detail Save the Children's field-tested basic education and early childhood interventions, designed to address the challenges to learning that children in marginalized groups face. We find through these interventions important impacts on equity. Results from basic education interventions in various countries show participants with the same teachers and the same limited class time, achieved greater gains when they participated in reading opportunities outside of schools. Broadening our thinking about the opportunity to learn to address life-wide learning opportunities that happen inside and outside the school walls, as well as learning prior to formal schooling offers better and more equitable solutions for all children.