Foreign economic-aid-related services

Tender description

Education is fundamental to development. Evidence highlights that education can enhance economic growth, and has most impact if children are both in school and learning. Learning propels education's transformational potential, contributing to better governance, peace, democracy, political stability and prosperity. The progress over the past decade in getting children into school shows what sustained national and international investment can achieve, but more needs to be done to ensure all girls and boys are in school and learning. The Department for International Development (DFID) is seeking to appoint an experienced and dynamic Directorate to design, manage and implement a 19 900 000 GBP multi-country Research and Innovation Hub on Technology for Education (the ‘Hub’) over 8 years. We face a global learning crisis and at present, over 260 000 000 children of primary and secondary school age are out-of-school, many of whom are marginalised and hard to reach. Of those in primary school in developing countries, up to one third are still not achieving basic levels of reading and writing even after 4 years of teaching. Even in more developed middle-income countries, the large majority of students are unable to reach levels of learning that are standard in OECD countries. Although the international community has prioritised learning in recent years, the challenge is massive and progress on raising attainment is slow. The International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunities (the Education Commission) has described this situation as the ‘civil rights challenge of our generation’, and called for the world to take advantage of this turning point to ‘create a learning generation’. The Department for International Development (DFID) is seeking to appoint an experienced and dynamic Directorate to design, manage and implement a 19 900 000 GBP multi-country Research and Innovation Hub on Technology for Education (the ‘Hub’) over 8 years. The global multi-disciplinary Hub will bring together experts in technology, education, research and innovation to answer the questions: o What works', (and what does not) to accelerate, spread and scale education technology interventions to deliver better learning outcomes for all children, including the most marginalised, in developing countries?, and o Which education technology interventions present the greatest value for money and social return on investment? The objective of the Hub is to provide decision makers with evidence to harness the transformative potential of technology to improve the delivery and governance of education for all. There should be a focus on reaching the most marginalised. DFID aims that this Hub supports and directs pioneering technologies with real potential to transform the education sector. The Hub will increase research standards to provide strong evidence on the use of technology in education in a timely and accessible manner. It is to go beyond simply understanding the effectiveness of technology, and instead to understand the genuine potential technology has ‘to work’ in challenging and constrained environments. The Hub will generate evidence across two main strands: o Country Research strand: This strand will research the impact on teaching and learning of Ed Tech interventions at-scale. By ‘at-scale’ we refer to the 5th and 6th stages in the International Development Innovation Alliance (IDIA) architecture of scale model, as outlined in Annex B. This will mean in-depth and rigorous research of interventions that have already had a proven impact on teaching and/or learning outcomes and are now being implemented at larger scale. This country research will take place in at least three DFID priority countries. Country based research teams should include world class researchers deeply embedded in-country, to facilitate impact of research findings and ensure cost data and financial evaluation is fed into current programmes, and o Growth-stage Innovative strand: This strand will identify and evaluate Ed Tech interventions at ‘growth’ stage, i.e. where the technology has been designed and tested and the focus is now on researching its impact on learning outcomes, through methods such as lean impact. By ‘growth stage’ we refer to the 3rd and 4th IDIA stages of scale, as outlined in Annex B. This will mean using grassroots outreach to identify promising and emerging initiatives and to accelerate the potential of interventions that work: i.e. to identify, test, adapt, iterate and validate through learning, supporting their journey to scale. Evidence will be generated through new approaches to ensure iterative and validated learning that is user-centred. The evidence should be disseminated in real-time and be used to inform h.