Rachel Hinton is the Lead for Global Education Research at FCDO, and a visiting Fellow of Practice at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. At FCDO Rachel grew a portfolio of research including RISE, EdTech, THRIVE on ECD, DeliverEd and the What Works Hub. She currently serves on the Secretariat for the Global Evidence Education Advisory Panel, which documents best practice of ‘what works’ to combat the global learning crisis. In 2014, she established the Building Evidence in Education global group with the World Bank, USAID, and the UN, to improve standards of research in the sector. She co-designed the joint World Bank, FCDO, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation EdTech programme on the use of technology in education, including work with the BETER group to coordinate efforts to collect data on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on education.

Previously, Rachel served as the senior human development adviser for DFID in Ghana (2009-12), Western Balkans (2006-09) and Nepal (2001). She took a secondment to UNICEF in New York (2005). 

As a lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh (1996-2000), she established new courses on refugees and South Asia and pioneered the Lacuna visual anthropology initiative. In Kenya, she taught gender relations at Kenyatta University, Nairobi (1997). Rachel serves on the Board of STIR Education, and she is an Advisory Member for the Brookings Institution Scaling Initiative.