Ears to the Ground: Reflections on the LFE-NIAS Research Symposium 2026

Written by Sahil Sharma

Every few years, a policy document arrives with the weight of genuine ambition behind it. The National Education Policy 2020 was one such document, approved after a 34-year hiatus, the product of a 50-month consultative exercise drawing on feedback from 2.5 lakh village-level stakeholders and two national committees. The scale of that effort was, by any measure, extraordinary. But scale invites a question of its own: how fully were those diverse voices incorporated into the final framework, or were they acknowledged and set aside? That question remains unanswered.

It is precisely that question that the third edition of the Annual Research Symposium by Leadership for Equity (LFE) set out to engage. Hosted this time in partnership with the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru, the symposium brought together researchers, educators, and practitioners over two days, with original research organised across four themes:

1. Foundational Literacy and Numeracy and Early Childhood Care and Education

2. Causal Inference, Scale and the Politics of Evidence in Education Reform

3. Reforming Teacher Education and Institutional Capacity Focus

4. Moving Beyond Foundational Skills: The Future of Learning and 21st Century Competencies

What follows draws on the research presented across all four themes. Rather than summarising individual papers, I have tried to read across them to find the currents running beneath the findings and to ask what they collectively suggest about the direction the field is moving in.

What the Earliest Years Are Revealing

Foundational learning is not a new preoccupation in Indian education. Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) and Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) have anchored policy conversation for decades, and the research presented in this theme emphasised its continued relevance. The researchers argued that the work here is unfinished, that innovation in pedagogy and instructional design remains as urgent as ever, even as the field's gaze begins to turn toward future readiness.

Papers in this theme drew on evidence from state-led missions like NIPUN Bharat, pointing to broad, measurable improvements in foundational skills at scale. But the more granular finding, one that concerns all of us in the space, was that district-level support structures and NGO partnerships are what drive gains in higher-order skills. The research suggested that while state-level missions generate broad improvements, the deeper gains, particularly in higher-order skills, tend to emerge where district-level support and NGO partnerships are actively present alongside them.

At the classroom level, the papers converged on a significant pedagogical shift. The move being advocated was away from teacher demonstration as the primary mode of instruction and toward structured student engagement and active practice. Researchers pointed to the role of toolkits as bridges between concrete materials and abstract conceptual understanding. In literacy, the scholarship presented pointed to systematic alpha-syllabic instruction, with phonemic awareness emerging as a strong predictor of word-reading efficiency in Indian languages, a finding with direct implications for curriculum and instructional design.

The Politics of Evidence

The second theme of the symposium addressed a question that underlies much of the field's work, though it is not always named directly: what counts as valid evidence, and who gets to decide? Guided in part by valid concerns about the Randomista movement within the sector, and in part by its rigour and strong promise in other sectors, the papers here interrogated both the value and the limits of quantitative rigour in education reform.

The researchers presenting in this theme were not arguing against rigorous evidence. They were asking for greater honesty about what any single method can and cannot establish. Researchers argued that evidence-based reform fails when it prioritises isolated technical validation over system-sensitive implementation, that a programme can produce strong RCT results and still fail at scale because the conditions that produced those results cannot be transferred to a messier, resource-constrained context.

Instructional leadership surfaced again here as a critical mechanism: district-embedded, practice-oriented training as what actually translates policy intent into classroom behaviour. One set of findings worth pausing on was the evidence around structured peer-teaching, which researchers showed produced measurable learning gains while simultaneously reducing student anxiety, a dual outcome that a narrowly quantitative assessment design might capture only partially.

For goals involving long-term sustainability, the scholarship presented here made a strong case for mixed-methods frameworks as a genuine requirement for better research. Numbers alone, the research argued, cannot build a credible causal narrative about how systems change over time. And the cost of getting this wrong is high: papers in this theme cautioned specifically that poorly validated assessment tools produce what one researcher described as "precise but misleading estimates," estimates that, when used to inform national policy and resource allocation, can misdirect effort at scale.

The Promise and the Gap in Teacher Development

The third theme of the symposium, Reforming Teacher Education and Institutional Capacity, highlighted a finding that ran through several papers: NEP 2020's ambitions are outpacing the reality of what most schools can actually do. Globally, researchers have called this “the implementation gap,” and the evidence for it was strongest in marginalised regions.

The scholarship identified three structural conditions that repeatedly undermine reform: ambiguity in what mandates actually require at the ground level, chronic staffing shortages, and administrative burdens that leave teachers with little time or space for pedagogical reflection. The research carefully framed them as systemic conditions rather than individual failures.

One intriguing contribution in the theme emerged through the idea of ‘Teacher Professional Knowledge’ (TPK). It was argued that teachers should be understood as active contributors to knowledge production rather than passive consumers of policy mandates. The authors described a strong "latent desire" among educators to inquire, experiment, and innovate. The problem, it was argued, was that this desire had nowhere to go. There are no structured spaces for it, no mentors to guide it, and rarely enough time left over after administrative demands to act on it.

The research in this theme also pointed to school leadership as an underdeveloped lever, principals who have the potential to function as pedagogical leaders but whose impact is consistently diluted by administrative churn. The recommendations that emerged were grounded in a simple premise. Reform works better when support is continuous, when teachers' own experience counts as evidence, and when the people closest to the problem have some say in how it is addressed.

The Future That Cannot Wait

The fourth theme, Moving Beyond Foundational Skills: The Future of Learning and 21st Century Competencies, posed a question that the symposium as a whole kept circling back to: do we wait for foundational skills to reach their full potential before turning attention to future-oriented competencies, or do we pursue both simultaneously?

The research presented here made a clear case for simultaneity. Papers in this theme showed that Future Literacies, computational thinking, ethical reasoning, and scientific temper are not a separate layer to be added once the basics are secured. They are the vehicles for higher-order competencies that can be embedded into routine instruction through intentional and equitable design. The evidence presented on data-driven career guidance and competency-based assessments offered practical illustrations of what that looks like without requiring foundational mastery to be declared complete first.

The research also took issue with how technology is often framed in policy discussions as a standalone skill to be taught and ticked off. What the papers argued for instead was an understanding of technology as something woven into how teachers think and make decisions, rather than a subject sitting alongside everything else. That reframing keeps the teacher central, a thread, notably, that runs through every theme the symposium addressed.

What the Scholarship Is Telling Us

Taken together, the research across these four themes does not point to a single intervention or a clear policy recommendation. What it points toward is a pattern. The persistent distance between a well-intentioned system and the conditions that would allow the people within it actually to do what the system asks of them.

The desire-action gap identified by the research among teachers is, in a sense, a description of the sector as a whole. The scholarship is not vague about what needs to happen. Coaching over compliance, proximity over scale, mixed methods over single metrics, teacher agency over administrative burden, these findings are consistent across themes and across research designs. What the symposium leaves open, and what the field now needs to sit with seriously, is a harder question: what the field must now reckon with is that knowing what works and building for it are not the same problem.