As we kick off 2025, the education sector stands at a critical juncture. There is immense potential to transform how evidence is generated, shared, and used to drive impactful education policies and programs. In this blog, we share five key wishes for the coming year.

Embedded education labs, increasingly referred to as EdLabs, aim to foster evidence-based decision-making in education by embedding evidence generation and use within government and implementation processes. Examples like Peru Minedulab and the UK’s Education Endowment Foundation demonstrate the significant impact these models can achieve. Over the past decade, the sector has seen a marked rise in EdLabs. Edlabs prioritize function over form, taking on diverse organizational setups, such as physical spaces and personnel embedded within government agencies or close evidence brokering relationships in a tightly knit government-research-nonprofit partnership (Hayter and Morales, 2023, Kembou and Dimovska, 2024). As we look ahead to 2025, we hope to leverage EdLabs to see more evidence on the evidence use process itself, making it ever more systematic.

A precondition for policymakers and practitioners engaging with evidence is that there is an accessible evidence base with which they can engage. Increasingly evidence synthesis products are used to summarise a large evidence base, allowing stakeholders to access high quality information without needing to access a hundred different studies from behind a paywall. Examples include the Smart Buys report and the Teaching and Learning Toolkit. Unfortunately, evidence synthesis is currently expensive and time consuming. In a perfect evidence system, we might be able to rigorously summarise an answer for policymakers the moment they ask the question (particularly if we want evidence as competing with other sources of information like asking an AI chatbot). Increasingly this ideal world is looking like it might be possible. The Global Evidence Commission has been calling for the development of shared living reviews, and at the UN Summit of the Future 2024, a number of funders announced a commitment to developing shared evidence infrastructure. A wish for 2025 is to accelerate evidence infrastructure and global goods in education with more public easy-to-analyze-and-use databases, in addition to the currently available reports, made available on the latest state of education evidence.

Education research continues to be predominantly designed, implemented, and funded by individuals or organizations external to the communities where it is generated. More research should be produced by those from and those living in the geographies studied. Kembou et al. (2023) include a series of best practices for more equitable research.

For research to make a difference in the real-world it needs to meet the needs of policymakers and practitioners. We need to shift to a policy and practice-driven lens in identifying questions that matter the decision-makers. EdLabs can play a critical role in facilitating this process.

There is growing attention on implementation science in education. New evidence suggests that even good policies rarely translate to services delivered to households in practice (Angrist and Dercon 2024). Closing these types of implementation gaps is a first-order issue. Recent efforts such as the What Works Hub for Global Education are placing a big bet on implementation science, with a focus both on the implementation of the science (e.g. informing policy and practice with evidence) and generating more science on implementation (e.g. nurturing more systematic understanding of implementation processes by governments and at scale).