Each year we award two prizes: one for education research, and one for education development. They can go to either an individual or a team of up to three people.
When we award a team, each member receives a certificate and a gold medal, while the cash prize and project funding are shared equally among them.
We announce our laureates annually in September. Subscribe to our newsletter to hear prize updates as they happen.
We usually open nominations in October and close them at the end of March the following year. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated.
Nominations are strictly confidential so we do not publish specific numbers or detailed information about particular nominations.
When we announce each year’s laureates, we’ll share information about trends: the range of countries and regions nominations come from and cover and general themes—like female education or teacher training.
If you’re interested in news and views from the foundation and our wider community, subscribe to our newsletter.
Our process is open to everyone. You don’t need to be invited to nominate a team or individual for either the Education Research or Education Development prize. You can even nominate yourself.
What we’re looking for are ‘credible witnesses’ to the nominees’ impact — so you need to have a thorough understanding of the work. Most of our nominators are members of government bodies, non-governmental organizations or professional associations. Or they’re professional educators, respected figures in the sector, or work in the same organization or sphere as the nominee(s). But you don’t have to tick one of those boxes: we welcome nominations from all.
You can’t make a nomination if:
Yes, they can be nominated more than once in the same category, or they can be nominated in both categories if their work spans research and development.
Having more than one nomination in one category doesn't increase their chances. If you know others who are also interested in nominating the same person or team, consider choosing one nominator between you, and asking everyone else to be a supporter. It'll probably make a stronger nomination overall.
You’ll get confirmation that we’ve got it, but we don’t give status updates during the judging process. You’ll hear from us again when we announce our laureates — usually in September. We’ll email all nominees, nominators, and supporters.
Of course, if our Judging Committee chooses your nominee(s) as a laureate, we’ll get in touch with them directly before the announcement.
Yes, we welcome nominations for young researchers and practitioners, as long as their work meets our judging criteria. The Yidan Prize is really for transformative and innovative ideas that have brought or have the potential to bring great impact to the systems and the community as a whole.
Yes, as long as you can demonstrate the social impact of their work.
As well as the judging criteria, our independent Judging Committee look at the nominee or nominees’ future project plans — that’s why we ask for a two-minute video. As part of that, we recommend that the nominee(s) talk about how they could potentially use the Yidan Prize for wider social impact — and we only put our funding towards non-profit activities.
You don’t have to nominate the leader of the organization, but the person or team you’re nominating should lead the work they’re being nominated for.
The organization lead must also endorse the nomination. They can do that by being the nominee, or the nominator or a supporter. If we can’t be sure the nominee(s) have led the work they’re being nominated for, our judges won’t consider the nomination.
Where any individual or team’s work clearly covers both research and development, you may consider submitting two nominations: one for the research prize and one for the development prize. Both prizes have independent judging panels, who make final decisions on both awards collectively. While there’s no particular advantage in submitting nominations for both categories, we recognise some work is more powerful for not fitting neatly into one or the other.
In fact, we deliberately designed two prizes that work in harmony: to build a network of educational experts who’re as strong in research as they are in practical application, in classrooms across the world. For example, we awarded our first Education Research Prize to Professor Carol Dweck: her pioneering work in growth mindset underpins and inspires practice. And as our 2020 Education Development laureates at CAMFED (the Campaign for Female Education) work with marginalized girls in sub-Saharan Africa, they partner with research institutes to track what’s most effective, who’s benefiting, and the costs.
If your nominee’s (or nominees’) work encompasses both research and development, you may consider submitting two nominations. For research, please share the nominee’s (or nominees’) relevant publications. For development, you can share independent reviews that will show our judges the impact and potential of the nominee’s (or nominees’) work.
As a reminder, here’s how we define the different areas:
As part of ‘future-oriented’ and ‘sustainable’, our judges do look for evidence that a project can be scaled, replicated, or adapted for greater global impact. Still, sometimes a project with deep impact in one region is more powerful than one with a lighter impact in multiple regions.
Encourage your nominee(s) to use their two-minute video submission to talk about their future plans. Our judges also want to know how the project funding, foundation network, and our Council of Luminaries could help them spread and scale up their work.
No, the two-minute video is the nominee’s moment to speak straight to the judges. They should use it to talk through their plan for the HK$15 million project funding. It’s also an opportunity to show their passion and commitment.
All nominations are submitted through the online nomination platform. Nominators must first register a nominator’s account through our platform. Please see our nomination platform registration guide for the steps to follow.
Please follow this guide for steps to follow if you forgot your password.
Apart from nominee’s personal details, you can keep editing and re-submitting your nomination right up to the closing date: Visit our nominations page to find out the closing date for the current prize year.
Every time you submit a new edit, we’ll delete the old version. So before you make a change, we recommend downloading a PDF of your current submission, so you can keep records and compare notes. Whenever you edit and submit, we’ll send you and any newly added supporters an email confirmation.
The only conditions we set are that:
You can upload or link to articles, publications, extra letters of support, pictures, videos, or other evidence that strengthens your nomination. We recommend uploading documents, but we know you might sometimes prefer to avoid large file sizes by sending links. In that case:
For education development, we strongly encourage you to include any independent evaluation reports of the nominee or nominees’ work.
We award our laureates HK$15 million (around US$1.9 million) in project funding over three years. Since we don’t have an interview round, this is your nominee’s (or nominees’) best chance to tell the judges in two minutes — and in their own words — what they’d spend it on.
What are judges looking for?
They’re looking for evidence of commitment, and a thoughtful plan for how to get the greatest impact from the project funding. While we don’t need a detailed budget breakdown, it’s helpful to understand how the nominee(s) plan to bring their vision into reality. That should include:
If it’s a team, we’d like to see all members speaking directly to the camera to explain their unique individual roles, as well as how they’ll collaborate.
We know many nominees will already have field photos and videos related to their work. We’d encourage them to submit these through the “Supporting documents” section (part 4 question 2) of the nomination form and reserve the two-minute video to speak directly to the camera — and to the judges.
Our judges won’t consider appearances (like age, race, or gender) when looking at the nomination.
What are the technical requirements?
The video must be in one of these file formats: .MP4, .MOV, .AVI or .M4V. We recommend you make it 1920 x 1080 in size, and at 1080p quality. We accept file sizes up to 200MB.
Don’t worry about the production quality. The judges are interested in the video’s content, not style.
What if I don’t speak English?
The nominee is welcome to record the video in their native language — in fact, sometimes that can make it easier to show passion. We just ask you to add English subtitles or a transcript, too.
Is there anything else I need to know?
The judges would like to hear from all team members, speaking directly to the camera and explaining their project plan, their unique individual roles, as well as how they’ll collaborate.
If team members are in different locations and video editing is not a viable option, you can consider using a video conferencing platform to record the video.
These are articles that have been reviewed by other experts in the field before publication. This review process is typically anonymous, and the article must meet the reviewer’s standard to be accepted for publication.
Editorials, book reviews, and other information in a journal don’t count as peer-reviewed work.
A peer reviewed journal typically ticks the following boxes:
• Has been published in a scholarly journal
• Is more than 10 pages in length usually (approximately 6000-8000 words)
• Has an abstract on the first page
• Is organized by headings such as Introduction, Literature Review, Data Collection, Analysis, and Conclusion
• Includes citations throughout and a bibliography or reference list at the end of the article
• Is written by credentialed authors, usually affiliated with a research institute or university
No, all information or materials must be uploaded to our nomination platform within the nomination period. We are not able to add additional materials to the submission after the nomination deadline unless they are requested by our independent judging committees.
We suggest you update an existing nomination form with the nominee(s)’ latest achievements. You may signpost the development of the nominee(s)’ work in a number of ways — by re-writing your nomination or simply including new paragraphs with updated information under relevant sections.
If you’d like to have a record of your existing nomination form, we recommend downloading it as a PDF file before making any edits.
Yes, we save all submissions on our platform. When nominations open for the following year’s entry, you can log back in to edit and submit again.
If you would like us to delete your nomination from our database, please contact us at nomination@yidanprize.org.
No, as long as it’s all up to date. But of course, you can add new evidence or supporter letters.
You can also use the same supporter letters as before if they’re willing to support your nominee(s) again. We’ll send them a confirmation and might get in touch for more information, so you should always check with them.
You can do either, or both. If the judges see more than one nomination for the same nominee(s) in the same category, they’ll put them together and review them as one nomination.
So there’s no advantage or disadvantage to submitting more than one—it’s up to you to decide if you want to nominate in both areas of work or just one.
One important note: since 2020, we’ve saved all nominations on our system so that you can easily re-submit in future years. But we don’t re-submit them automatically; you’ll need to check the details, confirm the supporters are still happy to go ahead, and submit again.
Supporters are individuals who know the nominee or nominees’ work well and can speak from their own experience about how it makes an impact.
In this section, the judges are looking for external endorsement on the nominee or nominees’ work. You can include at most one supporter from the nominee or nominees’ organization.
All nominations can have up to five supporters. For self-nominations you need at least three, or if you’re nominating someone else you need at least two.
You can’t be a supporter if:
If you have more than one supporter from within the organization, please upload them in “Supporting documents” section (part 4 question 2) of the nomination form. If you have more than five supporters, you can also include them in the next section, though we won’t count any of them as your official supporters.
When you submit your nomination, we ask you to confirm that all supporters have given you permission to share their letter and contact details with us. We’ll email them to let them know you’ve submitted a nomination, and might get in touch again if we need more information.
For team nominations, it’s especially important that you tell us how their work together makes a difference. So while the supporter can certainly call out specific individual achievements and contributions, the letter as a whole should describe the team’s collective impact.
If you do have a recommendation letter for one of a team of nominees, you can include it in the “Supporting documents” section (part 4 question 2) of the nomination form.
We set a limit of 5,000 words (most letters are two pages in length), which the supporter should use to clearly explain why they’re recommending the nominee(s). You should address the letter to the Judging Committee, Yidan Prize.
They can write about:
When you submit a supporter letter, you need to add contact details for one person. So with group letters, you have two options:
If you choose the second option, you should know it doesn’t count as an official supporter letter.
Laureate funding is flexible: it’s up to them whether they use it to expand their current work, replicate it somewhere else, or launch a new project. We only put our funding towards non-profit activities.
We see this as a long term, close relationship. So we’ll ask laureates to share written reports, photos, and videos regularly, and help them track their progress and impact.
You can find out more about making a Yidan Prize nomination and download our nomination guide and checklist here. If you have any other questions about nominations, please get in touch at nomination@yidanprize.org.