EdTech Impact and Learning Cabinet collaborate to bring educator feedback to global decision-makers

EdTech Impact and the Learning Cabinet are advancing their collaboration to integrate authentic educator feedback and impact data into the Learning Cabinet’s evidence board. Collected through EdTech Impact, the data sets support the Learning Cabinet’s mission to help governments globally in identifying the most impactful EdTech tools for their countries. 

This is a moment we want to celebrate – not only because of what it means for EdTech Impact, but also because of what it says about where the EdTech sector is heading. 

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What the Learning Cabinet is, and why this matters

The Learning Cabinet is a curated discovery platform built to help ministries of education, donors, and policymakers identify high-quality digital learning tools they can trust. It was developed by UNICEF’s Global Learning Innovation Hub in partnership with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland, the Asian Development Bank, and Arm. Tools are assessed through the EdTech for Good Framework, a five-pillar evaluation rubric covering safety, learning impact, child-centred design, accessibility, and contextual fit. 

The Learning Cabinet addresses a problem we at EdTech Impact know well: with over 100,000 EdTech companies globally, and very few ways for decision-makers to distinguish genuine evidence from marketing claims, the cost of getting procurement wrong most frequently falls on schools and the students they serve. 

EdTech Impact feedback and evidence insights will be made accessible through Learning Cabinet product profiles as complementary contextual information alongside the Cabinet’s existing evaluation data. The platform supports governments, donors, and partners in exploring and making informed decisions around digital learning tools in different educational contexts. 

 EdTech Impact’s evidence infrastructure is built on a continuously growing dataset of more than 50,000 educator impact stories, structured around the educational outcomes products claim to support and contextualised to the schools and use-cases each review reflects. Crucially, in EdTech Impact, it isn’t a single evidence stream. Practitioner experience sits alongside standardised usage data, learning event signals, and cross-context benchmarking, giving a richer, more independent view of how tools perform in practice than any one source could provide. 

“At the Learning Cabinet, we see authentic educator feedback as an important complement to structured evaluation processes. This collaboration helps bring practical classroom perspectives alongside existing evaluation data, supporting governments and partners in making more informed decisions around digital learning tools.” – Olli Vallo, UNICEF EdTech Strategist

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Endorsing EdTech for Good Framework v2

UNICEF is currently preparing to launch the next version of the EdTech for Good Framework, which will be released as a public good. EdTech Impact will officially endorse Version 2.0, and we are currently working through how the Framework’s principles can be operationalised within EdTech Impact Manager, alongside the other research-based standards we draw on. EdTech Impact has long believed that operational frameworks for schools should be grounded in the strongest available research, and in our view, Version 2.0 is a significant step forward in that direction. 

Michael Forshaw, CEO of EdTech Impact: “Authentic teacher feedback deserves to sit within the best evaluation frameworks in the world. That’s been the principle behind the evidence infrastructure we’ve been building at EdTech Impact since day one. Being the Cabinet’s first API partner means that we can give teachers and school leaders a voice in shaping the standards and decisions on how education technology is adopted globally. We’re excited to see where the partnership can go next.” 

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Sitting within a broader pattern of research engagement

This announcement reflects the position EdTech Impact has built in the sector over the past seven years. As one of only a few organisations holding evidence at the scale and granularity we do, EdTech Impact is increasingly drawn into the conversations shaping how education technology is evaluated, regulated, and adopted. These conversations span policy, research, system-level procurement, and the work of multilateral agencies. 

At policy level, for example, Michael has been invited to the Advisory Board for Phase 1 of the UK Department for Education’s EdTech Evidence Board pilot, contributing to the development of national standards for evidence quality in school technology procurement. In academia and research, Michael sits on the advisory board of the Oxford University Internet Institute’s EdTech research programme on equity, examining how digital tools are reshaping teaching and learning at a systems level. 

EdTech Impact’s research engagement extends across European and multilateral institutions. Our Head of Research, Anna Lindroos Cermakova, serves as an expert advisor to the Council of Europe on Artificial Intelligence in Education, contributing to the intergovernmental body’s work on the governance of AI in school settings. She is also lead author of the European EdTech Alliance’s Needs-Based EdTech Evidence Mapping Report, the framework that underpins much of EdTech Impact’s approach to evidence, and is also part of the evaluation team for the EdTech Evidence Board’s Phase 1 pilot. 

These engagements, alongside our work with the Global EdTech Testbed Network and the Qatar national testbed, reflect a consistent theme: that the question of what works in EdTech, for whom, and under what conditions cannot be answered by any one institution alone. It requires shared infrastructure, comparable evidence, and frameworks that can travel between contexts. 

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What’s next

In the coming weeks we’ll be sharing more about what EdTech Impact is becoming, and why we believe the evidence infrastructure the sector needs is not just possible, but already being built. The Learning Cabinet partnership is one of several signals that the conversation is shifting in the right direction. 

For schools and EdTech companies already using EdTech Impact, this partnership means the evidence you contribute now helps inform procurement decisions at a national and international level and your feedback informs practitioners globally. 

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About EdTech Impact

EdTech Impact provides independent evaluation infrastructure for understanding how, where, and for whom educational technology works in real classrooms. Founded in 2018, the platform provides an always-on engine for building evidence portfolios for over 7,000 product profiles, serving more than 600,000 users across the EdTech ecosystem. By combining contextualised user feedback, learning analytics, and deployment data, EdTech Impact builds a single, continuously evolving picture of how technology works in schools, giving educators, providers, and policymakers the evidence they need to make better decisions.