The research arrives against a sobering backdrop. Data from The Stanford Educational Opportunity Project cited in the study indicate that, compared to a decade earlier, 2025 reading and math scores were down 83 percent and 70 percent respectively, a decline the authors describe as a learning recession that predates the COVID-19 pandemic. Chronic absenteeism has nearly doubled relative to pre-pandemic years, with 30 percent of students chronically absent in 2021-22 compared with 16 percent in 2017-18. Meanwhile, roughly 20 percent of children aged 3 to 17 exhibit a mental, emotional, or behavioral health concern, including 11 percent diagnosed with anxiety and 4 percent with depression. Kirnan and Sampson frame animal-assisted services, in which trained and registered dogs and their handlers collaborate with educational professionals, as one innovative response to these converging academic and mental health struggles.

What sets the new study apart is its comparative design. Most prior research on therapy dogs in schools has examined short-term pilot programs and solicited feedback from a single group, typically students, teachers, or parents. The Calais program, by contrast, began in 2013 and has matured well past the novelty phase, with dog and handler teams on campus one to three days a week. The 2023 online survey captured the views of classroom teachers, professional staff such as counselors and therapists, other school staff, dog handlers, parents, and students, making it, to the authors’ knowledge, the first study to assess all six groups within a single school regarding the same program. Each group received its own tailored survey, with items rated on a 4-point Likert scale that was dichotomized to agree or disagree before statistical analysis.

The methodological architecture reflects four benefit themes drawn from the published literature: Well-Being, Academic Engagement, Socio-Emotional Competence, and Climate. All 161 respondents rated nine general statements, including whether the dogs help students feel welcomed, feel less anxious, feel supported, feel motivated to go to school, get along better with other students and with teachers, feel better about themselves, and feel less depressed, plus a ninth item on whether the dogs create a positive environment. A subset of nine task-specific statements, covering persistence after mistakes, preparation, focus, and emotional awareness and control, was rated only by the professional staff and the 30 students who participated in structured sessions led by counselors, speech therapists, occupational therapists, and reading specialists.

The statistical results were emphatic. Fisher’s exact tests revealed significant group differences for seven of the nine general benefit statements, with Cramer’s V identifying medium effect sizes, and the pattern was consistent: students expressed lower agreement than any adult group. The three lowest-rated items among students were getting along with others, getting along with teachers and staff, and being motivated to go to school, all falling below 50 percent agreement. The authors speculate that students may not perceive themselves as having difficulty in these areas and are therefore less likely to credit the dogs with enhancing them. Notably, agreement that the dogs create a positive environment was high across all groups, with no significant differences, suggesting that the climate benefits of a school-wide program are visible to everyone regardless of role.

Perhaps the most practically important finding concerns dosage, the informal concept describing how much exposure to a therapy dog a student receives. The study is the first to directly compare students who worked with the dogs in formal animal-assisted services sessions with those who encountered them only casually in hallways, at arrival and dismissal, or at school events. Contrary to the researchers’ hypothesis, the two groups reported broadly similar benefits. Students in formal sessions rated every benefit higher except one, but only a single difference, feeling welcome, achieved statistical significance, and its effect size was small. Casual participants still strongly endorsed reductions in anxiety and depression and feelings of being supported, reinforcing earlier reports that animal-assisted services ripple outward to non-targeted individuals and the broader school climate.

Within the structured sessions themselves, both professional staff and students strongly endorsed all nine task-specific outcomes, spanning persistence, preparation, longer work duration, harder effort, focus, anticipation of sessions, task performance, and emotional awareness and control. Professional staff rated every outcome higher than students except preparing work ahead of time, an asymmetry the authors attribute to information access: students know their own preparation efforts, while staff would only be aware of them if students shared that information. A chi-square test found only one statistically significant difference, with students rating persistence after mistakes lower than staff, though the phi coefficient revealed a medium effect size, suggesting the difference is noteworthy despite the small samples of 11 professional staff and 6 handlers that constricted statistical power.

The program’s operational details offer a technical template for schools considering similar interventions. The Calais model employs what the authors call the diamond model, in which a handler, an educational professional, a dog, and a student work together, with the professional responsible for the student and the handler responsible for the dog’s participation and welfare. This contrasts with the triangle model, where the educational professional also handles the dog. All dogs weigh between 50 and 70 pounds, range in age from 1 to 8 years, and must pass a recognized therapy dog evaluation and earn Canine Good Citizen certification before completing 6 to 12 months of additional training in The Calais Method. Welfare safeguards are explicit: dogs take a 30-minute break after every hour of work, never work two consecutive days, and have dedicated indoor and outdoor break space. The school is a member of IAHAIO, the International Association of Human-Animal Interaction Organizations.

The authors are candid about limitations. The findings may be specific to one school, one program model, and a student population with distinct needs, and respondents in a long-standing program may have been influenced by favorable school culture. Student perceptions warrant deeper investigation, since developmental differences in self-awareness, comprehension of survey questions, or social desirability may explain why adults consistently rated benefits higher. The authors suggest future studies use faces scales instead of verbal agreement scales, add interviews to verify how children interpret questions, and directly measure outcomes such as school belonging, reading skills, attendance, and task completion rather than relying on perspectives alone. They also call for research on dosage, including session frequency, duration, and dog-to-student ratio.

Nevertheless, the study dispels a persistent concern about therapy dog programs: that their perceived benefits might fade once the novelty of having a dog at school wears off. After more than a decade of operation, stakeholders at The Calais School still strongly endorse benefits spanning well-being, socio-emotional competence, academic engagement, and school climate. The high endorsement of a program spanning upper grades, where published research is thin, adds an important contribution to the literature. For educators searching for innovative supports amid a generation-long academic decline and elevated youth mental health concerns, the message from this real-world assessment is that school-based therapy dogs, implemented carefully across grade levels with rigorous welfare standards, are perceived as beneficial by nearly everyone in the building, students included, even if the students themselves are the most modest about it.

Subject of Research: Stakeholder perceptions of the benefits of school-based therapy dogs in animal-assisted services at a special education school

Article Title: Comparative analysis of multiple stakeholder perspectives on the benefits of school-based therapy dogs at a special education school

Article References: Kirnan, J. P., & Sampson, O. (2026). Comparative analysis of multiple stakeholder perspectives on the benefits of school-based therapy dogs at a special education school. Discover Animals, 3(1), Article 103. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44338-026-00264-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44338-026-00264-1

Keywords: therapy dogs, animal-assisted services, special education, school climate, student well-being, socio-emotional competence, academic engagement, stakeholder perspectives, mental health, The Calais School, human-animal interaction, K-12 education

The research team, led by Ukamaka Gladys Okafor of Euclid University, conducted an exploratory, phenomenological qualitative study between October 2024 and February 2025. Rather than surveying frontline clinicians or students, as most previous studies have done, the researchers purposively recruited the chief executives or representatives of six health regulatory agencies and fourteen leaders or representatives from eleven professional associations spanning nursing, pharmacy, medicine and dentistry, medical laboratory science, optometry and radiography. These are the professions the Federal Government of Nigeria has documented as being most affected by international health worker migration. Twenty participants were interviewed, in line with Creswell’s guideline that eighteen to thirty participants is appropriate for a qualitative study of this kind.

Data were collected through in-person, in-depth interviews and virtual sessions on Zoom, each lasting an average of forty-five minutes and recorded with informed consent. A semi-structured interview guide, developed from validated questionnaires used in earlier migration studies, probed how emigration had affected each sector, what it meant for the quality and cost of care delivered to the public, what it did to the professionals who stayed behind, and whether destination countries or emigrants themselves could give something back. Recordings were transcribed verbatim, anonymized as far as possible, and analysed with a hybrid coding approach that combined deductive codes drawn from the study objectives and prior literature with inductive codes that emerged directly from the participants’ narratives. The team then discussed the emerging themes with peers to guard against bias and reached consensus on the final interpretation, reporting the work against the Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research checklist. Ethical approval came from the Lagos University Teaching Hospital Health Research Ethics Committee.

The scale of the problem the participants described is enormous. The World Health Organization projects a global shortfall of eighteen million health workers by 2030, concentrated in low- and lower-middle-income countries, and Nigeria sits squarely in the blast zone. By 2030, the country is predicted to face a 29.25 percent deficit of nurses and a 33.45 percent deficit of doctors. A survey by the Medical and Dental Consultants Association of Nigeria found that more than five hundred medical consultants have already left the country to practise in developed nations, and nine out of ten consultants with less than five years of experience had plans to emigrate. Across the wealthy countries of the OECD, between 25 and 32 percent of physicians in the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States and Canada are international medical graduates, many trained in South Asian and African nations, a dependency that has deepened over the past five decades and was accelerated by the added demands of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thematic analysis of the interviews produced two overarching themes, negative and positive effects on the health system, subdivided into seven sub-themes. On the negative side, participants described an acute shortage of skilled personnel across every practice setting, from academia and supply chains to clinical, regulatory, private and public sectors. One participant with thirty-eight years of post-qualification experience spoke of an acute shortage across community, hospital and manufacturing sectors of pharmacy practice, while another, forty-two years qualified, said migration depletes the pharmaceutical workforce so severely that businesses and institutions struggle to find qualified pharmacists at all. The shortage is the most immediate and visible effect, but the participants stressed that it triggers a cascade of secondary failures that compound over time.

Among the most insidious of those failures is the disruption of organizational plans and leadership continuity. When senior and skilled staff leave abruptly, institutional strategies stall: service expansion projects, training programmes and new policy implementations are delayed or abandoned, and replacements may take so long to arrive that inefficiencies and poor outcomes follow. Leadership and decision-making gaps open up, mentorship structures collapse, and junior staff are left without guidance or institutional memory. One participant with twenty-eight years of post-qualification experience noted that many professionals leave without proper handovers, affecting projects, policy and advocacy work. In a health system that depends on experienced practitioners training the next generation, the loss of a single consultant or professor can ripple through an entire specialty for years.

The quality of care delivered to the public is the next domino to fall. Participants reported longer wait times, reduced access to specialist care, misdiagnosis, delayed treatment and rising morbidity and mortality. One participant said many hospitals have lost fifty to seventy percent of their staff, with some shutting down specialized units entirely for lack of experts. Others warned that untrained personnel are stepping into roles meant for professionals, and that private facilities unable to find qualified staff are relying on assistants and technicians, a task-shifting that further erodes standards. Those who remain shoulder crushing workloads. Participants described overwork, stress, frustration, burnout, dissatisfaction and medical errors as direct consequences of the shortage, a finding consistent with international evidence that burnout and long weekly working hours are independent risk factors for medical mistakes. Burnout also breeds feelings of incompetence and emotional exhaustion that deepen professional dissatisfaction, feeding a vicious cycle in which miserable working conditions push yet more clinicians toward the airport.

The economic toll is equally severe. Participants lamented the loss of public funds invested in training professionals who leave almost as soon as they qualify, with one participant remarking that the country wastes enormous sums training these professionals only to watch them go. Previous economic analyses have estimated that low- and middle-income countries spend between roughly 29,898 and 65,997 dollars annually to train each physician, and that the economic costs of increased mortality from health worker shortages run into billions of dollars per year. The shortage also inflates the cost of care for ordinary Nigerians, who are forced to consult the few remaining practitioners or expensive private facilities, undermining progress toward universal health coverage. Brain drain and chronic underfunding have together fuelled medical tourism, particularly among the political class, draining further resources from a system already on the edge.

Yet the study is not a one-sided lament. Participants identified genuine benefits that emigration can confer on the source country. Emigrants often gain advanced qualifications, cutting-edge skills and technologies unavailable in local training institutions, enhancing their professional competence. Some return temporarily or periodically with experts, health products and devices, organizing medical missions and health outreaches in Nigeria that include complex surgeries, transplants and access to rare medications. Through teaching, mentoring and hands-on training, these returning professionals transfer international best practices to their colleagues at home, and participants reported improvements in service quality attributable to knowledge and skills transfer. Beyond individual returns, diaspora networks channel donations, funding for health projects, virtual mentorship, supportive telemedicine and cross-border consultations, and migrant health workers send substantial remittances to families left behind. The participants and the authors are careful to note, however, that these benefits do not outweigh the negative impacts, and the literature on which they draw reaches the same conclusion.

The study’s authors argue that the findings demand urgent, multi-sectoral and systemic action rather than piecemeal fixes within individual professions. Because migration cannot be completely halted, they recommend that the Nigerian government strengthen the national health workforce by creating and funding more training institutions, ensuring equitable distribution of health workers across the country, and developing practical, implementable retention policies. At the same time, they urge the government to maximize the positive side of emigration by pursuing bilateral partnerships with destination countries and encouraging emigrated professionals to contribute through structured mentorship, telemedicine programmes and health investments. The stakeholders interviewed for the study warn that if the outward movement continues unchecked, an impending crisis awaits the Nigerian health sector. What this research makes clear is that the story of health worker migration is neither purely a tragedy nor purely an opportunity; it is a systemic challenge that will be shaped, for better or worse, by the policy choices Nigeria makes now.

Subject of Research: The impact of health workforce emigration on Nigeria's health care system from the perspectives of regulatory bodies and professional associations

Article Title: A qualitative exploration of multi-stakeholder perspectives on the impact of health workforce emigration on Nigeria’s health care system

Article References: Okafor, U. G., Eze, O. P., Oseni, Y. O., Onwuchuluba, E. E., & Obiakor, N. M. (2026). A qualitative exploration of multi-stakeholder perspectives on the impact of health workforce emigration on Nigeria’s health care system. Discover Social Science and Health, 6(1), Article 105. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44155-026-00441-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44155-026-00441-3

Keywords: Nigeria, health workforce, brain drain, emigration, health care system, qualitative research, health policy, burnout, medical tourism, knowledge transfer, universal health coverage, stakeholder perspectives

The study’s methodological approach is deliberately comparative. Rather than surveying one group of adults about what readiness means, the researchers adopted a qualitative embedded single-case design and gathered semi-structured interviews with twenty-one participants spanning the full arc of the transition to primary school. The sample included eight primary school teachers, six preschool teachers, and seven parents. This three-way structure matters because most existing research has relied on single stakeholder perspectives, which the authors identify as a significant gap in the literature. By placing the accounts of the people who teach five-year-olds, the people who teach four-year-olds, and the people who raise them side by side, the study could map exactly where their constructions of readiness converge and, more revealingly, where they diverge.

The interviews were analyzed using qualitative content analysis, a systematic method for coding textual data into categories and themes. The researchers grounded their work in an ecological tradition that traces back to Urie Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model of human development, which holds that child development cannot be understood apart from the nested systems of family, school, and culture that surround it. That theoretical commitment shows in the results. Readiness, in this study, is not a list of attributes but a network of relationships, and the same network looks different depending on where an observer stands within it.

One of the study’s clearest findings is that school readiness extends well beyond the early literacy and numeracy skills that dominate popular anxiety about starting school. Across all three stakeholder groups, participants described a multidimensional construct encompassing language and communication skills, self-regulation, motor development, and social-emotional adaptation. This aligns with a substantial body of prior research. Longitudinal work has shown that early attention and social skills predict later academic achievement, sometimes as strongly as early math and reading scores, and studies of preschool social-emotional learning have repeatedly linked emotional competence to early school success. The Turkish study adds texture to that consensus by showing that even when stakeholders agree on the broad dimensions of readiness, they weigh them very differently.

Those differences follow the logic of each group’s pedagogical role and observational context. Primary school teachers, who must manage a classroom of twenty or more children the moment school begins, emphasized classroom functionality. For them, readiness is whatever allows the daily machinery of instruction to run: a child who can sit, follow routines, listen, and participate without constant individual intervention. Preschool teachers, observing children in a play-based and developmentally oriented environment, focused on developmental precursors, the underlying capacities in self-regulation, language, and motor coordination that make classroom functioning possible later. Parents, meanwhile, prioritized observable academic indicators and motivation, the things they can see at home: a child who recognizes letters, counts, and seems eager to learn. Each perspective is internally coherent, yet none captures the whole picture alone.

This divergence is not merely a curiosity of perception research. It has practical consequences for how transition programs are designed and evaluated. If parents believe readiness means knowing the alphabet while teachers believe it means being able to wait one’s turn, then a family preparing a child at home may be optimizing for the wrong target, not through negligence but through a rational reading of what they can observe. Prior comparative studies in Singapore, Australia, and the United States have documented similar mismatches between parental and teacher priorities, and research on family-school connectivity during the transition to primary school suggests that communication gaps between home and school are a persistent feature of this developmental juncture. The new study reframes these mismatches not as errors to be corrected but as structural features of a multi-actor system that must be actively coordinated.

The relational framing also carries a pointed implication for accountability. If readiness is a capacity that emerges from interactions among children, families, and schools, then responsibility for a successful transition cannot rest on the child or the family alone. This echoes the influential ecological model of the kindergarten transition developed by researchers including Robert Pianta and Sara Rimm-Kaufman, who argued decades ago that the transition to school is shaped by the social ecology of classrooms, families, and children together. It also resonates with the concept of readiness as a relational construct advanced by Australian researchers Sue Dockett and Bob Perry, whose work on transition programs has shaped policy across the Asia-Pacific region. What the Turkish study adds is a fine-grained, interview-based account of how that relationality is actually constructed in the language of the people involved.

The study’s context gives its findings additional weight. Turkey has been rapidly expanding preschool enrollment, with national education statistics showing continued growth in early childhood provision, and the country’s Ministry of National Education has updated its preschool curriculum in recent years. In systems undergoing that kind of expansion, the alignment between preschool pedagogy, primary school expectations, and parental understanding becomes a live policy problem. A preschool sector that emphasizes play and holistic development feeding into a primary sector that emphasizes formal instruction creates precisely the discontinuity that transition research warns against. The authors’ finding that preschool teachers speak in terms of developmental precursors while primary teachers speak in terms of classroom functionality is, in effect, a description of that discontinuity rendered in the vocabulary of the educators themselves.

Methodologically, the study is candid about its scope. Twenty-one interviews in a single case cannot establish how widespread these patterns are, and the authors do not claim statistical generalizability. What qualitative designs of this kind offer instead is analytical depth: a documented account of how meaning is constructed, with enough detail for readers to judge its relevance to other contexts. The researchers followed established guidance on saturation in qualitative sampling and reported their analysis procedures transparently, and the work received ethics approval from Niğde Ömer Halisdemir University with informed consent from all participants. The interview data themselves are not publicly available, owing to the confidentiality of information about identifiable teachers, parents, and children, though the authors note the data are available upon reasonable request.

The conceptual payoff is the study’s central reframing: school readiness as a multi-actor, context-dependent transition capacity rather than a fixed developmental threshold. In practical terms, that means the question worth asking is no longer simply whether a child is ready for school, but whether the relationships surrounding that child, between home and classroom, between preschool and primary school, between what parents can see and what teachers need, are configured to carry the child across the transition. The authors suggest this relational and ecological perspective offers a more accurate account of how readiness is constructed across educational contexts than any single-informant checklist can provide. For a field long dominated by assessment instruments and readiness screenings, the message is quietly radical: readiness is not something a child has, but something a community does, and the adults who disagree about its definition may be the very people who need to start talking to each other.

Subject of Research: Stakeholder perspectives on school readiness during the transition from preschool to primary school

Article Title: School Readiness as a Relational Transition Capacity: A Comparative Study of Stakeholder Perspectives Across Educational Levels

Article References: Demirtaş, E. N., & Taneri, A. (2026). School Readiness as a Relational Transition Capacity: A Comparative Study of Stakeholder Perspectives Across Educational Levels. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02361-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02361-y

Keywords: school readiness, school transition, early childhood education, preschool, primary school, parental involvement, family-school relationships, self-regulation, social-emotional development, qualitative research, stakeholder perspectives, developmental psychology