Janeli Kotzé is currently a researcher at the South African Department of Basic Education. She completed her PhD in Economics at the University of Stellenbosch, focussing on understanding the complexities of the South African education crisis and on the improvement of national policy around this issue. She has been involved in a number of local and international research projects relating to the evaluation of national policy, cross-national comparisons of educational achievement, learning trajectories of children over time and the interaction between low quality schooling and child poverty, and Early Childhood Development.