Beyond Sandcastles: Why scale means building with government
By Siiri de Oliveira Palas, Senior Programme Fundraising Manager (Institutions), British Asian Trust
At the recent annual gathering of the International Education Funders Group, one metaphor stayed with me long after the sessions ended. It was a warning against building “sandcastles”: impressive structures that look substantial while the tide is out, but wash away once the funding recedes.
The problem with “sandcastles”
The image lingered because it captured something uncomfortable about our sector. Too often, we still celebrate islands of excellence. Programmes that work, pilots that win admiration, initiatives that deliver strong short-term results. These efforts matter, and they often represent real innovation. But they also risk obscuring a harder question. Not whether we can design something effective, but whether what works will still be there when external funding ends.
Durability as a determinant of scale
That question sits at the heart of what we mean by scale. Too often, scale is understood in terms of size: how many people are reached, how quickly something grows, how large the funding becomes. What surfaced repeatedly in conversations at the convening was a quieter but more demanding idea: that durability is a key determinant of scale, shaping whether an approach becomes embedded, financed, and sustained within the systems it is meant to improve.
This is where government inevitably comes into focus. Not because governments are easy partners, or because public systems are always effective, but because they are the institutions that ultimately determine whether an idea lasts. They write the rules, set the standards, allocate the budgets, and shape the incentives that govern delivery. In practice, they decide what moves from being an exception to becoming the norm.
There is a growing recognition across the sector that scale without systems is fragile. Research on scaling in education consistently points to the same set of conditions: long-term financing, political champions, and a supportive policy environment. These are not add-ons to scale; they are part of scale itself. Practitioners working on “scaling what works” increasingly argue that programmes which grow without institutional change may expand for a time, but they rarely endure.
If we take this seriously, then durability has to sit alongside impact as a core measure of success. A programme can be effective and still remain fragile. A solution can be evidence-based and still fail to stick. The more revealing question is what allows a good idea to become ordinary. What turns a well-funded exception into something that is routinely financed and delivered at scale.
Financing for system-level change
One answer lies in engaging government not only as a stakeholder, but as a core actor in how solutions are financed from the outset. This is one reason the Skills Outcomes Fund now being developed in India is so instructive. The fund is being developed as a collaboration between government and partners including the British Asian Trust, with the explicit aim of aligning public, private, and philanthropic capital from the outset. It links investment to verified employment outcomes and is designed to sit within the country’s skilling architecture under the National Skill Development Corporation and the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship.
That is a fundamentally different proposition from philanthropy financing standalone interventions at the margins. It is government using public resources in ways that reward outcomes, while creating space for private and philanthropic capital to align behind the same results. In doing so, it brings public finance into the scaling story from the beginning, rather than treating it as something that follows proof of concept.
This shift is echoed in wider thinking on the future of education financing. As McKinsey & Company argues in its work on moving “beyond the grant,” philanthropy’s role is evolving from funding individual programmes to helping reshape how systems themselves are financed. The implication is that lasting impact depends not only on identifying what works, but on ensuring that funding flows are structured in ways that allow those approaches to be sustained within public systems.
There is also a practical design challenge that sits beneath this. Many funders will recognise the dynamic where external funding supports something governments already intended to do, only for public resources to be redirected elsewhere. Development economists have long described this as fungibility. The lesson is not to step back from government, but to engage more deliberately. Outcomes-linked approaches do not eliminate this risk entirely, but they can reduce it by tying funding to verified results rather than to inputs, making it harder to treat external capital as a simple substitute for existing budgets.
None of this suggests that government is the answer to every problem, or that every philanthropic intervention should aim immediately for state adoption. Some work should remain experimental, and some actors will continue to play an important role outside the system. In certain contexts, caution is still warranted. But if the goal is lasting impact at scale, public systems cannot remain an afterthought. They are where durability ultimately resides.
What emerged most clearly from the convening was not a single consensus or a silver bullet, but a growing convergence around a more demanding idea. If we want better ideas to survive beyond the grant cycle, we have to think much more seriously about how governments fund, absorb, and sustain them. Otherwise, however impressive our sandcastles, the tide will always come in.