This blog was written by Lavinia Blundo, Research Assistant with Mokoro, and first published on the Mokoro website on 18 September 2025.
The 2025 UKFIET conference theme ‘Mobilising knowledge, partnerships, and innovations for sustainable development through education and training’ brought together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to discuss how education can respond to today’s global challenges, such as widespread funding cuts, changes in aid architecture, climate change, and rising inequality.
It was my first time attending a UKFIET conference and across the sessions I joined on climate and environmental justice, learner safety and wellbeing, skills and knowledge for sustainable futures, and systems financing, three themes emerged: the need for joined responses across actors, the value of multi-layered and locally grounded approaches, and the importance of building and using stronger evidence to inform action.
- Polycrises necessitate a joint response involving various stakeholders
The session Where Water Disrupts explored how education systems in flood-prone regions can adapt to the intensifying effects of climate change. In both South Sudan and Mozambique, researchers highlighted that communities, children, teachers and policymakers all hold parts of the solution. In South Sudan, community voices were shown to be crucial for understanding long-standing resilience strategies that pre-date humanitarian interventions, while also showing that the impact of climate change has reached levels unknown before. In Mozambique, I found the idea of positioning children as co-researchers, agents of change and knowledge producers, centring their lived experiences alongside educators and policymakers to co-create more context-responsive solutions particularly interesting and innovative.
These examples underscored that responses to polycrises must be holistic and inclusive, bringing together diverse actors from policymakers to youth groups, to co-design context-specific and sustainable responses and have the desired impact.
- Multi-layered, holistic approaches are the most impactful in the long run
The evidence presented on education in conflict and protracted crises reinforced that single-issue or short-term projects rarely deliver lasting results. Holistic, context-specific interventions combining learning support, gender norm change, community engagement and institutional reform have proven most effective, for instance, in enhancing girls’ education and promoting gender equality in contexts of conflict and crisis.
Yet, donor funding tends to be short-term project-based, often siloing responses to crises, making it difficult to sustain gains. A session on teacher professional development, particularly on integrating education in emergencies into pre-service teacher education emphasised the need for institutionalisation and system integration for more sustainability.
Building resilience in education ultimately requires embedding change within national systems (teacher education, community structures, and financing mechanisms) rather than relying on isolated projects. Given these pressures, progress is both more important and more challenging, all the while finance is tightening: in 2022, the median government allocation to education was 4% of GDP and 12.6% of public spending; education’s share of sector-allocable aid was 8.4% in 2023, with IATI-based analyses indicating a fall in 2024 and further declines by 2027.
- Evidence gaps remain widespread, yet evidence-based interventions prove more effective in addressing issues
A recurring theme throughout the conference was the role of evidence, still often missing, yet essential for linking research, policy, and practice.
This was raised in several discussions, from the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel’s work on reading instruction, which showed the large-scale improvements possible when reforms are grounded in research on how children actually learn to read, to sessions on gender data and outcome-based financing.
Discussions on education data emphasised that participatory and intersectional approaches make data more relevant and credible. At the same time, both the gender data and financing discussions reminded us that data and evidence are inherently political: what gets measured shapes accountability and action.
Stronger, more contextual evidence can bridge divides between policy and practice, but only if it is meaningfully used, not simply generated.
