The department is a lively community that is recognised internationally as one of the top centres for research and teaching in development studies.

Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
We used data from a representative sample of public and private schools in Lagos state, Nigeria, to explore the effectiveness of low- and medium- cost private schools in producing English language outcomes. We described the scale of low- and medium-cost private schooling in low- and- middle income countries and provide descriptive statistics regarding the characteristics of students in private and public schools in Lagos. We found students in low and medium-cost private schools perform better on English language assessments in Lagos and this is particularly true for English as a Second Language students. Using a series of linear regression models and the Kitagawa-Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, we found that private schools both attract students more likely to do well and are better at transforming these student endowments into better language outcomes. However, we found the composition of classrooms – specifically the share of students who speak English as a First Language – gender, wealth and age yielded significant results while attending a private school did not. While no model can fully capture the complexities of the various predictors of learning outcomes, our results suggested the private school learning gap is at least in part reliant on the provision of access to a different type of peer group.