Foreign economic-aid-related services

Tender description

The Department for International Development (DFID) is seeking to appoint an experienced and dynamic Directorate to design, manage and implement a 19 886 884 GBP multi-country research and innovation hub on technology for education. The EdTech research and innovation hub will bring together experts in technology, education, research and innovation to answer the questions: 1) What works (and what doesn't work) to accelerate, spread and scale education technology interventions to deliver better learning outcomes for all children, including the most marginalised, in developing countries? and 2) Which education technology interventions present the greatest value for money and social return on investment? The Hub will play an important part in DFID's larger strategic partnerships, particularly with the World Bank, exploring the impactful and equitable use of innovative technologies to benefit teaching and learning in developing countries. The objective of the Hub is to provide decision makers with evidence, insights, approaches and expertise 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. The Hub will support and direct the use of 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. The hub will provide expertise to a range of stakeholders including DFID Education Advisors working in-country. It is to go beyond simply understanding the effectiveness of technology, and instead to explore the genuine potential technology has ‘to work’ in challenging and constrained environments. We (DFID and the Directorate, together with partners like the World Bank) will work closely with country teams, policy colleagues across Whitehall (including the cross-government EdTech network, DFE, DIT and BEIS) and internationally to ensure research drives better decision making and value for money for education programmes. Programme delivery model. An ambitious and different programme delivery model is envisaged. The directorate will need to deliver against 3 main strands of work: (i) programme management, including cross-programme management, internal and external communications, commissioning and coordination of country research teams and innovation evaluation teams, stakeholder engagement, research uptake and synthesis; (ii) Research leadership, including the development of a creative mixed-methods approach, new conceptual models; and methodological tools, regular intellectual engagement across researchers and technical expert group members, and the synthesis of cross-programme research findings into academic and policy-focused publications that drive new understanding and uptake of the potential of technology to transform education, especially for the most disadvantaged; and (iii) innovation acceleration and horizon scanning, including identification through grassroots outreach of promising technologies that might improve teaching and learning (especially for the most marginalised), support to these innovators to test and adapt their technology-based intervention to learn what works or what needs to change, and an evidence based springboard for growth and scale; (iv) knowledge sharing and capacity building through storytelling, blogs, workshops, toolkits, co-design processes, learning journeys and horizon scanning of future technologies, methodologies and trends. Evidence. The Hub will generate evidence across 2 main strands: — research strand: This strand will research the impact on teaching and learning of EdTech interventions, especially 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 comprise in-depth and rigorous research of interventions that have already had a proven impact on teaching and/or learning outcomes and which are now being implemented at larger scale to generate evidence, document good practices, inform related advisory services. This research will focus on at least 3 DFID priority countries. Research teams should include world class researchers and practitioners deeply embedded in-country, to facilitate impact of research findings and ensure cost data and financial evaluation is fed into current programmes, and — innovation strand: This strand will identify and evaluate EdTech interventions at ‘growth’ stage, i.e. where the technology has been designed and tested and the focus is now on researching its impact on a variety of educational service delivery metrics — most notably 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.