The research, conducted by Wajeeha Hazoor of Florida State University, addresses a fundamental flaw in the existing literature: the tendency to treat low-fee private schools as a homogeneous entity. Proponents, including influential scholars such as James Tooley, have long argued that these schools succeed in providing affordable education through concessions and state vouchers to the poorest families. Opponents counter that they reproduce educational inequalities by deliberately excluding the poorest through fee-charging practices, regardless of how low the fees are. In terms of quality, critics maintain that student performance at these schools does not exceed that of children in public schooling, and that gains are marginal even when found. Hazoor’s study reveals that positive findings on quality derive from better-resourced schools, whereas negative findings on access and equity stem from underfunded or hyper-commercial versions, making overarching claims problematic.

To overcome this limitation, the study applies a typology of low-fee private schools in Pakistan, differentiating among types based on ownership and fee range. The framework identifies two structural modalities: Independent schools, developed by community members for philanthropic or entrepreneurial purposes, and Chain schools, franchisees of national elite private schools, higher educational institutes, or philanthropies. These are further bifurcated by fee structure into three categories emerging from the urban research site of Rawalpindi: roughly $4.44 to $5.33, $8.89 to $11.11, and $24 per month. Notably, the cheap independent and chain schools, along with medium-range independent schools, were predominantly found in low-income neighborhoods, while costly independent and chain schools appeared only in mixed-income areas, indicating that the economic baseline of neighborhoods determines the fees charged.

The methodological design was equally innovative. A holistic case study approach was implemented with 17 purposively selected schools serving as units of analysis, permitting cross-case synthesis in a context where the boundaries between the phenomenon and its socioeconomic context were unclear. At each school, surveys were administered and key informant interviews took place with principals, teachers, school owners, an administrator, and a coordinator, engaging a total of 40 participants. In a methodological first for researchers operating in data-poor contexts, the study relied on Facebook data as an indigenous source of knowledge to fill gaps and triangulate findings. A staggering 19,320 pictures posted on school pages were iteratively open-coded, with thematic saturation reached at 120 inductive codes relying on 1,343 picture families. Facebook was selected because websites require financial investment that cash-strapped schools may lack, whereas the social media platform serves as a free marketing tool in the Pakistani context.

Access and equity were conceptualized as affordability and its gendered nature, examining how these interact with families’ socioeconomic status to inform enrollment decisions for boys and girls. Quality was measured through structural and infrastructural proxies rather than the performative, neoliberal measures that dominate the literature, such as student test scores. The study examined teacher qualifications, teacher training, willingness to provide extra assistance to struggling students, and the provision of extracurricular activities. This fills a critical gap, as empirical evidence has confirmed that increased exposure to extracurricular activities has positive effects on academic achievement and other transferable skills, including socialization. The economic construct of contract failure, rooted in principal-agent theory, was operationalized by examining how schools skim on aspects of operations that do not directly inform higher profit margins, capitalizing on parents’ lack of information to distinguish between a holistic educational experience and market-facing proxies such as school averages.

The findings reveal stark variations across school types. The poorest integration of access and equity was found at cheap, medium-range, and costly independent schools in low-income and mixed-income neighborhoods, yet the medium-range and costly independent schools were among the strongest performers in terms of educational quality, along with costly chain schools in mixed-income areas. Conversely, cheap chain schools in low-income neighborhoods were the most likely to integrate access and equity into their operations, yet they were among the poorest performers in terms of quality. The data confirm that schools unable to integrate access and equity by design unless they have access to extraneous financial support, relying on the generosity of strong philanthropic networks or owner resources. Low fees, by design, limit longevity if not augmented by additional resources.

Cream-skimming, the practice of enrolling high-performing students and rejecting those who do not pass admissions tests to preserve class averages, was prevalent across nearly all school types, with only two exceptions. Exclusionary practices included rejecting overaged or disabled children, with one popular cheap chain school reporting rejection of new admissions when class capacity of 33 students was reached. A common approach was to exclude students who performed poorly on admissions tests, with exclusion or demotion more prevalent at costly independent and chain schools in mixed-income neighborhoods. Parents were found to game the system by hiding students’ previous report cards, prompting one costly independent school to demote poor performers to classes below their age group rather than outright rejecting admission. Demotion thus emerges as a unique form of cream-skimming to maintain class averages.

The exclusion of students with disabilities proved particularly complex. Six schools explicitly stated they had no policy of enrolling disabled children, with responses appearing to be a product of the neighborhood context. Better-resourced schools in mixed-income areas were more able and likely to accommodate students with disabilities, while low-income neighborhood schools could not do so, even when claiming disability inclusion, due to inaccessible buildings. One medium-range independent school owner replied in an irritated tone that disabled children should go to their own school, while a costly chain school owner explained that the Government of Punjab has a full department of disability, so people prefer to avail that option. This indicates that while these schools position themselves as substitutes for the state educational system, they are quick to hand off responsibility for students who may bear additional costs or threaten school averages.

Teacher quality revealed a clear market orientation, with schools prioritizing teachers of subjects deemed important for profit-making, particularly English, which is a major reason parents send their children to these schools as opposed to public institutions where the medium of instruction is the local language. Master’s-qualified teachers were hired at six of the 12 schools providing data, predominantly at medium-range chain schools and costly independent and chain schools in mixed-income neighborhoods. In low-income areas where profit margins are lower, high school-educated teachers were hired to teach mathematics, with one medium-range independent school employing a single high school-educated instructor to teach all subjects to Grade 4 students. Teacher training programs were rare at cheap and medium-range independent schools, with only two better-resourced medium-range independent schools found to have such programs. Chain schools had uniform access to training as a result of franchising conditions, though teacher poaching was reported as common in the sector, explaining why poorly resourced independent schools do not uniformly invest in building their teaching staff’s capacity.

Without exception, all schools prioritized student performance, providing additional academic assistance before, during, or after school hours to ensure children were absorbing lessons, suggesting that remedial assistance is not optional but a requirement for competitiveness in the local market. Cheap independent school teachers provided tutoring on school premises before or after hours or during the midday break, while a medium-range chain school offered additional Saturday classes for what they term weak students. The shadow educational system, encompassing private tutoring, was found prevalent, with tuition academies commonly situated in buildings right next to or within school premises. Even a school whose owner actively discouraged tutoring was found to have established a tutoring academy on its own premises during fieldwork. The affordability critique holds for costly independent and chain schools, which are affordable only for middle-class families according to recent figures from the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, which put average household monthly income at approximately 188 USD. With the poorest households having approximately five children under the age of 10, it is difficult for families living below the international poverty line of 2.15 USD per day to enroll all children without discounts, fee flexibility, or waivers for each additional child. The findings demonstrate that policy toward low-fee private schooling must be calibrated to specific types, fee structures, and regulatory contexts, rather than implementing irrevocable, blanket actions against a sector that remains the sole form of schooling for many poor children in the context of documented public educational supply gaps.

Subject of Research: Low-fee private schooling in Punjab, Pakistan: revisiting debates on access, equity, and quality

Article Title: Low-fee private schooling in Punjab, Pakistan: revisiting debates on access, equity, and quality

Article References: Hazoor, W. (2026). Low-fee private schooling in Punjab, Pakistan: revisiting debates on access, equity, and quality. SN Social Sciences, 6(8), Article 346. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01629-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01629-9

Keywords: Low-fee, private, schooling, Punjab, Pakistan, revisiting, debates, access, equity, quality, scientific research

The stakes of the question are hard to overstate. Executive function skills develop rapidly during childhood, and performance on executive function assessments in early life predicts academic achievement, social competence and behavioral adjustment years later. Meta-analyses cited by the authors link early executive function to reading and science outcomes, to long-term academic attainment and even to reduced risk of psychopathology. Because these skills correlate with so many positive life outcomes, they have become one of the most attractive targets for intervention in developmental science, education policy and public health. Programs ranging from preschool curricula to computerized brain training have been launched on the premise that executive function is highly malleable. Yet the review notes that the experimental evidence for far transfer, meaning improvements that carry over from trained tasks to real-world outcomes, remains weak, and meta-analytic work on cognitive training generally concludes that gains rarely generalize beyond the trained tasks themselves.

The authors begin by examining how executive function is defined and measured, and they identify this as a foundational problem. In the classic latent-variable framework, executive function decomposes into inhibition, working memory updating and shifting, with a common underlying factor. But in young children, tasks designed to tap these components often fail to show the clean separations seen in adults, and performance depends heavily on how familiar children are with task demands, labels and materials. Studies showing that familiar labels help children engage proactive control, or that multidimensional reasoning boosts performance on the dimensional change card sort task, suggest that what looks like a general executive capacity is often knowledge and context bound. The review argues that executive function is best understood as a set of skills that are shaped by experience and deployed in specific situations, rather than as a fixed, domain-general cognitive muscle that any training program can strengthen.

Measurement is where this conceptual ambiguity becomes a practical crisis. The most common assessments, including conflict tasks such as the flanker and day-night paradigms, card sorting tasks and delayed gratification measures, were largely developed in Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic populations. Cross-cultural work reveals striking variability: cognitive flexibility patterns differ across cultural settings, and studies in Jordan, Kenya, Brazil, South Africa and The Gambia show that task performance and its environmental predictors do not map neatly onto the models built in North American and European samples. Parent and teacher rating scales, such as the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function, capture yet another construct, one that correlates imperfectly with laboratory performance measures. The authors highlight emerging alternatives, including group-based classroom assessments and observational measures that embed executive function demands in real-world activities, which may better capture how regulation skills operate where children actually live and learn.

Turning to socioeconomic status, the review acknowledges one of the most consistent findings in the literature: children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds tend to score lower on executive function assessments, an association confirmed by meta-analysis. But the authors are emphatic that this correlation is causally ambiguous and often context-dependent. Socioeconomic status is a composite construct encompassing income, education, occupation and neighborhood resources, and critics cited in the review argue that treating it as a unitary variable obscures the specific mechanisms at work. Longitudinal studies point to candidate mediators, including cognitive stimulation, language development and environmental predictability, with neuroimaging work suggesting that cognitive stimulation is linked to neural function supporting working memory. Genetic confounding also looms large, as studies of maternal education and prenatal smoking show that inherited factors account for a substantial share of the apparent environmental effects. The review warns against deficit framing, urging researchers to consider how children’s skills may represent adaptations to the specific environments they inhabit.

The home environment and parenting emerge as a second major experiential domain, and one where the evidence is similarly suggestive but rarely decisive. Household chaos, characterized by noise, crowding and unpredictable routines, is associated with poorer executive function, an effect documented in meta-analysis and partially buffered by high-quality childcare. Home literacy environments, parental scaffolding, autonomy support and attachment security all show positive associations with children’s self-regulation in numerous studies spanning the United States, China, Chile, Korea and Côte d’Ivoire. Experimental work adds encouraging signal: an experimental study found that autonomy-supportive interactions improved preschoolers’ self-regulation, and a randomized clinical trial showed that an early parenting intervention accelerated inhibitory control development among children involved with child protective services. Still, the review stresses that most of this evidence is correlational, that effect sizes are typically modest, and that gene-environment correlation means children both shape and are shaped by their families in ways that standard designs cannot untangle.

Schooling, the third focal domain, offers some of the strongest quasi-experimental evidence that experience shapes executive function. School cutoff designs, which compare children born just before and just after enrollment deadlines, indicate that a year of schooling improves cognitive control and even alters associated patterns of brain activation. Differential growth in working memory across school-year and summer months suggests that classrooms actively promote executive function development rather than merely tracking maturation. The quality of teacher-child interactions matters as well, with meta-analytic evidence linking classroom interaction quality to children’s executive function gains. Curricular interventions tell a more complicated story. Programs such as Tools of the Mind generated early enthusiasm, but large rigorous evaluations have produced mixed results, while games-based approaches such as Red Light, Purple Light have shown benefits for school readiness in some low-income samples, including trials in Kenya. The Chicago School Readiness Project stands out for demonstrating longer-term impacts on behavioral regulation that persisted into late adolescence.

Why, then, has the intervention literature so often fallen short of its promise? The review offers a synthesis: interventions have typically treated executive function as a generic capacity to be exercised like a muscle, rather than asking what specific experiences, in specific contexts, help specific children regulate their behavior toward specific goals. The authors draw on a growing contextual perspective in developmental science, one that recognizes culture as constitutive rather than incidental. Culturally organized practices such as autonomy and helping, Indigenous frameworks of connectedness and culturally meaningful forms of self-regulation all suggest that the skills valued and cultivated in one community may differ from those assumed by standardized assessments and imported curricula. Ethical concerns raised by anthropologists about parenting interventions exported to low- and middle-income countries reinforce the point that interventions must be grounded in local meanings, values and strengths rather than framed around supposed deficits.

The review closes by outlining four key directions for future work. First, researchers need better conceptualizations of environmental quality and experience, moving beyond coarse socioeconomic categories to measure the specific features of environments, such as cognitive stimulation, predictability and stress, that plausibly shape developing regulation skills. Second, the field must improve the measurement of executive function itself, developing contextually grounded assessments that are validated across cultural and linguistic groups and that capture regulation as it unfolds in classrooms, homes and everyday activities. Third, studies must be designed to support stronger causal inference, leveraging natural experiments, randomized designs and genetically informed methods while remaining ecologically valid. Fourth, the authors call for greater attention to diversity and equity in who is studied, how findings are interpreted and who benefits from the resulting interventions, including genuine partnerships with communities in majority-world settings.

For a field with such high public stakes, the message of this review is both sobering and generative. Executive function skills matter enormously, they are demonstrably linked to experience, and yet the science of exactly how experience builds them remains incomplete in ways that have limited the success of interventions designed to improve children’s life chances. By demanding sharper concepts, better measures and culturally informed designs, the authors are not dismissing decades of work but redirecting it toward the questions that matter most. If the next generation of research can specify how experiences get under the skin to strengthen children’s regulation of thought and action, the promise of executive function science, from closing achievement gaps to designing smarter educational policies, may finally be kept.

Subject of Research: How experience such as socioeconomic status, parenting and schooling shapes the development of childhood executive function skills

Article Title: Understanding how experience supports the development of executive function skills

Article References: Doebel, S., Chevalier, N., Lipina, S. J., Rabii, V., & Ahmed, S. F. (2026). Understanding how experience supports the development of executive function skills. Nature Reviews Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-026-00614-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44159-026-00614-6

Keywords: executive function, child development, socioeconomic status, parenting, home environment, schooling, cognitive control, self-regulation, working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, intervention