When research travels: ROE scholarship shapes education policy discourse in Egypt

Private tutoring always sparks controversy, with the Ministry of Education opposing it, impeding the achievement of equality of access to education for all children. However, in Egypt, the demand for private tutoring has increased to improve the education quality of their children. This highlights the need to determine whether private tutoring centers have a positive role in the education of children or if the fight against them persists.

In November 2022, a policy report titled “Private Tutoring Centers: Supplementing or Competing with Schools?” cited an academic article by Chinese educator Dr. Wei Zhang on the regulation of private tutoring. The article, “Regulating Private Tutoring in China: Uniform Policies, Diverse Responses,” originally published in ECNU Review of Education (ROE), was referenced not merely as a comparative case, but as a concrete example of how education systems can regulate private tutoring—a topic of mounting urgency in Egypt.

This case exemplifies how research published in ROE can influence international policy conversations, particularly within the Global South. It is more than a citation; it is a sign of growing scholarly relevance across contexts.

A Chinese Approach to a Global Challenge

In her article, Dr. Zhang analyzes how the Chinese national government has prioritized the regulation of private supplementary tutoring (often called “shadow education”). The regulatory agenda was developed in the context of addressing public concern about the heavy burden on students and the sector’s significant implications for social inequalities. China’s regulatory interventions included measures aimed at reducing study loads and reasserting state control over pedagogy. These regulations covered aspects such as setting limits on class schedules (including a curfew at 8:30 p.m.), strengthening teacher qualifications, and tighter content regulation to prevent teaching beyond the school syllabus.

This discussion resonated strongly in the Egyptian context, where the private tutoring market creates financial pressure on low-income families, causing it to become a significant factor for inequality in education, and exerts an outsized influence on students’ learning and life trajectories.

Policy Uptake and Strategic Translation

In its report, “Private Tutoring Centers: Supplementing or Competing with Schools?”, the Egyptian analysis cited Zhang’s work as a strategic international reference. While not presented as a ready-made solution, China’s experience was treated as an example of how a populous and diverse country has taken legal and institutional steps to confront the shadow education dilemma. The Egyptian report itself notes that combating the phenomenon successfully in some countries was achieved by providing legislation and reasonable regulatory procedures.

This moment of uptake reflects a broader shift in educational knowledge circulation: rather than flowing unilaterally from the Global North to the Global South, policy ideas increasingly travel laterally—across countries facing parallel reforms, shared challenges, and mutual curiosity.

ROE as a Platform: Scholarship with Reach

The journey from ROE to Egypt highlights the journal’s growing role as a conduit for policy-relevant scholarship. By publishing theoretically grounded and empirically rich studies from diverse settings, ECNU Review of Education fosters South–South knowledge exchange and opens up new circuits of influence in global education discourse.

As Dr. Zhang’s work shows, meaningful policy dialogue can begin not in summits or ministries, but on the pages of an academic journal—when research meets relevance, and scholarship is made visible beyond its place of origin.