At IPA, we believe education systems work best when decisions are guided by clear, actionable evidence. Yet despite rapid growth in the education evidence base, challenges remain in turning that knowledge into timely, relevant, and accessible insights for decision-makers.

That’s why we joined leading education organizations in endorsing a new Statement of Intent to strengthen how evidence is synthesized and applied. Together, we are building a shared repository and supporting evidence intermediaries, Embedded Evidence Labs (EdLabs)—especially in low-and-middle-income countries—to create policy-relevant syntheses and link them directly to government decision-making. A pilot will launch in 2026, with plans to scale in 2027, ultimately building an evidence infrastructure that will improve learning outcomes for children worldwide.

Statement of Intent

A collective initiative to support evidence synthesis and use in education

Much of the $5.8 trillion spent on education every year is not guided by evidence on what we know about children and learning. While the education evidence base is growing fast, challenges persist around evidence synthesis, translation and use. For example, synthesising evidence into clear, trustworthy policy and practitioner friendly guidelines is unnecessarily expensive and time consuming.

In response, we are delighted to announce this collective initiative to build and test a synthesis ready evidence repository for the education sector. Together, we will:

• Pool existing evidence data with a co-created sector taxonomy into a shared repository.
• Conduct a global and open RFP for evidence intermediaries and EdLabs (particularly in the Global South) to test a “minimum viable product” of the repository during 2026, by producing syntheses in response to country-based policy and practice needs.

The repository will be a ‘back-end tool’ designed to make the work of evidence intermediaries much more efficient. It will build upon and support broader evidence synthesis infrastructure coalescing around the Evidence Synthesis Infrastructure Collaborative (ESIC).  It is an important step in making user-centred and contextually relevant synthesis the norm, especially in resource constrained environments.

Depending on what we learn during 2026, we aim to scale the initiative much further in 2027.  We intend that this relatively small investment in evidence infrastructure will have an exponential impact on children’s learning.

The full ‘Statement of Intent’ above is co-signed by: Alive, Campbell Collaboration, Centre for Evidence and Implementation (CEI), Durham University, Education.org, Education Endowment Foundation, Effective Basic Services (eBASE) Africa, EPPI Center, ESRC, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), Future Evidence Foundation, Innovations for Poverty Action, Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies, International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), Jacobs Center, Jacobs Foundation, The LEGO Foundation, Porticus, viaEd, Wellcome Trust, and the What Works Hub for Global Education