Why Good Education Ideas Don’t Scale: Lessons From Pilot and Practice
Across many low- and middle-income countries, education systems continue to struggle to ensure that children acquire foundational literacy and numeracy. This is not because the sector lacks promising approaches.
The harder problem is getting what works to stick.
Education innovations often demonstrate results through pilots or individual programs but struggle to become part of government systems at meaningful scale. Financing ends. Implementation weakens. Evidence does not translate into policy. Models designed for one context are transferred elsewhere without the conditions that made them effective. And governments are frequently asked to absorb new approaches without the resources, capacity, or institutional support required to sustain them.
That challenge is becoming more urgent as the environment around education changes. International aid is contracting, increasing pressure to make limited resources work harder. AI is already entering classrooms through teachers and students, often ahead of system-level governance or understanding of how it is being used. At the same time, locally developed approaches, citizen-generated data, government partnerships, and South-South learning are creating new possibilities for how education systems improve.
This session will explore what it takes to move from promising interventions to lasting system change. How should governments, funders, and implementers decide what is ready to scale? What makes an innovation become part of a public system rather than remain a project alongside it? How can evidence capture not only whether something worked, but what happened during implementation? And how can Global South governments, practitioners, and communities have greater influence over which ideas and investments shape education priorities?
The goal is not innovation for its own sake. It is stronger education systems capable of finding, adapting, financing, and sustaining approaches that help young people learn.
Discussion Group Leaders
- Manushi Yadav is Head, Strategy and Global Partnerships at Pratham, strengthening strategy and partnerships that expand opportunities in education and skills development.
- Gonzalo Almeyda is Comms & Advocacy Manager at PAL Network, advancing evidence-based action and Global South perspectives to improve foundational learning.
- Devyani Pershad is Chief Impact Officer at EIDU, advancing scalable approaches that improve learning outcomes and strengthen education systems.
- David Nkrumah-Boateng is Country Programme Lead at PEAS Ghana, strengthening education programs through strategy, research, evaluation, impact measurement, and evidence-driven learning.
What to Expect
A systems-level conversation about why education reforms and innovations succeed, stall, or disappear as they move toward scale. Foundational learning will provide an important lens, alongside lessons from government partnerships, locally developed models, financing, implementation evidence, and South-South learning.
AI will be considered as one part of a rapidly changing education landscape, particularly where its adoption is already moving faster than government systems can understand or govern it, rather than as the defining subject of the session.
Who This Is For
This session is for education ministries, funders, implementers, researchers, education innovators, Global South education leaders, civil society organizations, and others working on foundational learning, education financing, government partnerships, and system transformation.
What You Will Get Out of It
- A clearer understanding of why promising education approaches often fail to become lasting parts of government systems
- Lessons for scaling foundational learning through government rather than around it
- Approaches to connecting implementation evidence, policy, financing, and action
- Perspectives on local ownership and South-South learning as approaches move across contexts
- A framework for thinking about innovation, including AI, in terms of whether it strengthens the education system