**Process quality indicators show substantial room for improvements in how teachers engage young students.** The findings from Teach ECE provide ample evidence of areas in both structural and process quality that would benefit from further investment. In more than one-fourth of segments observed, the teacher was not engaging children in a learning activity. Classroom Culture was largely positive, but in just one third of segments were teachers observed providing children with constructive feedback, in just 12% were children engaged in any kind of critical thinking activities, and in just one third of segments did children have any sort of autonomy over their participation in class activities.

**Teaching quality matters – more than teacher education and experience** . Despite low levels of teaching quality in many classrooms, we find strong evidence of its association with outcomes. In earlier analysis, we disaggregated levels of children’s learning and development by classroom and teacher factors, we found that children’s skills varied by teacher level of certification, with children in classes taught by teachers with higher education exhibiting stronger outcomes. We also found that classes with more highly educated teachers exhibited higher levels of quality. However, once we controlled for multiple factors simultaneously, we find consistent and positive associations between teaching quality (i.e., practices employed by teachers in the classroom) and outcomes, but that other teacher- and classroom-level factors matter less. Our results cannot be taken as causal evidence, as we discuss more in _Limitations,_ but these results suggest that that differences in outcomes by teacher certification may be due to the higher quality of classrooms taught by more certified teachers.

Given the low levels of quality observed in many classrooms, these results are encouraging as a potential path forward for further investment in both the material resources preprimary classes have access to and use as well as encouragement for teachers to engage in more evidence-based classroom practices.

**Female teachers perform** . As mentioned above, most teacher and classroom factors were not associated with outcomes after controlling for quality. One exception was teacher gender. We find a small but consistent advantage in AIM-ECD performance from classrooms led by a female teacher that are not explained by differences in quality or background.

# **Limitations**

This work is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to systematically examine the early learning and developmental status of children enrolled in ECE settings and the quality of such settings in selected districts of South Punjab, Pakistan. Its strengths lie in its ability to present rich data on both teaching quality and child outcomes using a large, representative sample of schools from a particularly disadvantaged setting in a low-income country. We must also acknowledge the limitations of this work. These limitations fall under three main categories: sampling, design, and interpretation.

# **_Sample_**

The sample of children included in this study is a representative sample of pre-primary aged children studying in the 3,400 PHCIP public schools and can be reasonably argued to be representative of the full population of public pre-primary aged children in the 11 districts in South 38