Crosscutting Findings and Recommendations: ASEAN Sandboxes

Insights

The following insights demonstrate that technical interventions must address the entire system to be truly viable.

• Evidence is a resilience tool that can promote policy continuity: Innovation in the public sector is often vulnerable to leadership transitions. The “Doing to Learn” approach served as a primary mechanism for building institutional memory. By moving beyond design documents and documenting the actual sprint journey, teams created a factual baseline that survives administrative shifts.

• There are often tensions between “Compliance vs. Quality”: The reality of the field is that front-line stakeholders—including ministry technical units, school heads, and teachers— will always prioritise compliance over abstract quality. The sandboxes showed that capacity building alone is insufficient to resolve this tension, as stakeholders are held accountable to official mandates that often reward speed and compliance over depth. For example, in Indonesia, the pressure to achieve an “Excellent” (80+) IKK score often led to a “check-box” approach that sidelined quality. 

• Designing for Universal Access should not be an afterthought: Acknowledging stakeholder differences in background and technical skills, and creating opportunities to level the playing field, can produce a greater long-term impact. Especially for national-scale implementation, the sandboxes reveal that meeting stakeholders where they are leads to more sustainable and adaptable interventions.

• There is value in leveraging existing evidence and systems: In the process of finding answers and testing assumptions, the three sandboxes reveal that ministries have strengths and existing resources that just need revisiting and reframing to address current needs. 
• Anchor on human capital, even in tech solutions: Throughout the sandboxes, whether it is in the area of leadership, data-gathering, or teaching and learning in AI, centring human behaviour and needs as the main driver in meeting objectives can determine successful outcomes.

Recommendations

To move from evidence to regional impact, these recommendations outline the structural shifts required to sustain educational innovation. By prioritising utility over compliance, these steps ensure that policy survives the transition from a pilot to a permanent system.

1. Reducing Implementation Risk Through Field-Testing

Policy and programmes formalised in a vacuum may risk encountering significant friction upon first contact with the real world. National rollouts should be preceded by a “Sandbox Phase.” This allows teams to identify behavioural and technical risks—such as user friction or administrative misalignment— in safe spaces before significant budget or political capital is committed.

2. Designing for User Incentives 

To bridge the gap between compliance and quality, a system should be designed as a two-way value exchange. Rather than “extracting” effort from users for high-level monitoring, actions should yield quick returns that justify the work. This ensures that high-quality participation is a benefit, not a burden. For example, in Indonesia, MoPSE units with high IKK scores are eligible for performance bonuses. However, this is not limited to financial incentives; it also includes productivity gains. For instance, in the Philippines, schools found the tool useful not just for assessment, but as a direct source of information for developing their annual school plans. Furthermore, stakeholders expect that their data leads to concrete next steps; they are more incentivised to participate when they see themselves as active partners who can influence decisions, rather than mere sources for data.

3. Standardising for Resource-Constrained Environments

Technical survivability in the most constrained environments must be the baseline for all procurement. Low bandwidth, ageing hardware, and varied technical literacy are not secondary concerns—they are primary design constraints. If a solution is built to function effectively in the most challenging conditions, it will operate with high efficiency across the entire country. To achieve this, design should prioritise efficiency from the start to ensure the core utility remains constant regardless of the environment. This means building systems that allow users to continue their work during connectivity gaps and ensuring the process stays functional—rather than failing—when resources like bandwidth or hardware are limited. 

4. Building Resilience Through Habit-Standardisation

Institutional memory is often lost during leadership transitions. To build resilient policy, innovation should focus on aligning existing routines—such as record-keeping and internal communication—rather than imposing entirely new, separate workflows. By embedding standards directly into daily tasks, high-quality work becomes the path of least resistance. For example, rather than introducing abstract theories, providing standardised templates for meeting minutes and internal memos ensures that even junior staffers use correct terminology and follow policy standards while simply “doing their job.” Similarly, focusing on the daily filing process through a unified digital structure allows evidence to be saved in real-time. This turns routine administrative habits into a permanent, audit-ready archive that survives even when the leadership or team changes.

The overarching lesson is that intervention only sticks when it returns immediate value to the person using it. By designing for the human reality of the system—whether they are teachers, school heads, or policy officers—we can transform top-down mandates into sustainable, bottom-up habits.

This work is part of the portfolio of projects delivered by the ASEAN-UK SAGE programme. The ASEAN-UK SAGE programme is delivered by the British Council and SEAMEO Secretariat, in partnership with EdTech Hub and Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), and is an ASEAN cooperation programme funded by the UK.