The global learning crisis
Back in 2015 and as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, all UN Member States adopted 17 sustainable development goals. A 15-year plan set out to end poverty, protect the planet and improve the lives and prospects of everyone, everywhere. Four years later in 2019, world leaders had their first chance to review progress on goal number 4, Quality Education.
And the assessment was not good. In 2018 around 260 million children were out of school and more than half of all children and adolescents worldwide were not meeting minimum proficiency standards in reading and mathematics. The report pointed to a lack of tangible progress in meeting this crisis and highlighted an urgent need to do things differently.
Specifically, the quality of education globally had not kept pace with the “rapid technological changes” that present both huge opportunities and significant challenges for educators - technology held the promise for better learning worldwide, but this potential was not harnessed.
The EdTech Hub was established to realise the potential of technology
Of the realisation that technology had the potential to transform education worldwide, the UK government along with the World Bank, announced in 2019 funding for the world’s largest ever educational technology research and innovation programme - the EdTech hub.
The core aim of the EdTech Hub is to push the effectiveness of EdTech interventions up, and to help implementers and decision-makers understand what works when it comes to tech in education.
With a track record of bad implementation in the sector, the EdTech Hub was challenged with showing how education technology can be implemented at scale, so better learning outcomes can be delivered for all children, but especially the most marginalised.
Brink is appointed innovation lead
Brink’s role within that programme is to lead the innovation stream. In practice this means examining the current lack of effectiveness in the EdTech sector and showing how evidence generated through the iterative testing and growing of ideas can drive the understanding of what works and the path to scaling, and in doing so, create a blueprint for others to follow.
In priority, we built a portfolio of systemic experimentation - providing access to tools, experts and funding to educators and partners in environments we call ‘sandboxes’.
Systemic experimentation as a priority
Education systems are multifactorial, uncertain or unpredictable environments. In a ‘sandbox’, partners test and grow ideas by executing impactful, iterative experiments that help them learn ‘what works’ in the real world.
In the world of software engineering a sandbox is used to describe a space that allows developers to test new code before rolling it out across the board. In the context of EdTech innovation, a sandbox is a real-life location that’s used for experimentation, where implementers can learn safely and adapt in a small space before rolling out promising ideas more widely.
By creating a sandbox, we by default make evidence generation the job of implementers.
For example, we may test a new EdTech intervention within the sandbox of a single school. After we’ve adapted to any challenges there, we then roll out the initiative to a cluster of schools. There will be new issues that present themselves at this bigger scale, but once we’ve solved them, then we can extend our approach to an entire education district.
Our sandboxes are designed to close the ‘know-do’ gap - the gap between what we know works and what is delivered.
Looking for innovation beyond the tech product
In practice, this means that the products we work with may change completely, or be dropped altogether if they don’t solve the problem. It also means that we can experiment with the myriad systems and pressures surrounding the intervention if we think that might solve the problem more effectively. We refer to this system in which an intervention exists as its ‘enabling environment’.
An enabling environment can include an intervention’s design, manufacturing, route-to-market, distribution, financing, user adoption, policy environment and more.
For example, a brilliant new EdTech intervention may be asked to operate within a hugely constrained policy environment. Here, the policy change itself might be ‘the innovation’ that makes scaling the idea possible. Or, we could encounter a great intervention that is working for a small group of people but hasn’t yet figured out the business model that would allow it to scale. Here, the business model might be ‘the innovation’.
Bringing stakeholders together around a common mission
Finally, our success in scaling EdTech has depended on our ability to engage and connect relevant stakeholders of an EdTech ecosystem around a clear, common mission, corresponding to a clear government priority.
Where a Sandbox goal has linked to a clear government priority is where we’ve seen the most success at bringing people together. And where we’ve seen misalignment of goals, the ability of the EdTech intervention to scale has directly been impacted.
Sandboxes are therefore about balance - between consistently supporting national government priorities, while making sure different parties have the freedom to experiment to achieve the goal across all aspects of an education system. This has meant purposefully designing sandbox environments around a specific goal, that at the same time retain the freedom to work with different partners and incentivise them to try different ideas and generate evidence while they learn across different parts of the system.
Selected success stories
In Malawi, our Sandbox with onebillion reduced the cost per child of the digital personalised learning intervention from $37 to $6 and secured an agreement with the Department of Education to leverage their transport infrastructure and schools. As a result, it is now scaling nationwide to 5000+ schools
In Zanzibar, through testing different virtual learning environment models, we arrived at a student-led, offline, interactive intervention that is integrated into national policy and shaping a $50 million World Bank investment.
In Kenya, our Sandbox to build the #KeepKenyaLearning campaign pivoted from providing content to caregivers to bolstering their confidence to use content and is now embedded in the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development.
The evidence from rigorous testing we conducted with officials in Ministries of Education in Sub-Saharan Africa led to UNICEF ESARO’s decision to discontinue the Regional Learning Hub initiative, a large investment in pan-African digital learning resources. This led to significant time and financial savings.
