Embedding research into the implementation of programmes and policies to achieve learning, equity and inclusion at-scale

• In Event: The Case for Locally-driven Implementation Research and the Shift It Demands from Funders

Proposal

Seven out of ten children in low and middle-income countries are in ‘learning poverty,’ unable to read a simple text by the age of ten. When children fail to attain foundational skills early in life, it hinders their capacity for further learning and greatly reduces their prospects for their future employment.

How do we address learning poverty to help every child reach their full potential? There have been several innovations in the way education is delivered that have shown to improve learning and equity, but these have generally been at small scale and/or in specific contexts. Some of the best documented global evidence on improving learning still fails to result in programmes achieving results for children at-scale. Less is known about how to make these innovations and programmes sustainable, how to maintain and improve their effectiveness in different contexts and how to scale them to the communities that need them most.

UNICEF Innocenti - Global Office of Research and Foresight has been working across more than 40 countries to embed research within systems, policies and programmes, exploring ‘what works’ and ‘how to optimally scale’. In this presentation, UNICEF Innocenti will share three examples of leveraging implementation research, from the Data Must Speak Positive Deviance research, which leverages implementation research to explore what practices and behaviours are already being successfully implemented in high performing schools, why, and how to scale; to the Innovations in Education research, which embeds implementation research into large-scale digital learning programmes and remedial and alternative education programmes to create real-time feedback loops that have informed UNICEF and government strategies.

Author

• Linda Jones, UNICEF