Strengthening the role of the middle tier can help link policy with practice.

In an educational context that is constantly changing, one of the main challenges in Latin America and the Caribbean is designing policies that not only respond to current demands but also anticipate future challenges. Against this backdrop, the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is working with governments to strengthen the role of the middle tier, which plays a key function in linking policy with practice.

The gap between the design and implementation of education policies often highlights the complexity of systems, which require coordination, knowledge of the territory, and management skills at different levels.

Within this systemic framework, there is a key structure for ensuring that plans and projects reach schools and meet their objectives: the middle tier. These are a set of roles and functions that articulate national or sub-national decisions with local realities. Their work allows the definitions of the central level to be adapted to specific contexts, in a process of situated policy translation. They are strategic decision-makers, as they can create the necessary conditions to move towards greater equity and quality in learning.

With this as a starting point, the regional event “Middle tier: between policy and the classroom. Keys to strengthening their effectiveness in Latin America”(available in Spanish), organized by IIEP-UNESCO in LAC, brought together more than 50 participants in person and more than 500 online attendees from different countries in the region to address a central question: how to strengthen and support this sector?

Articulating the global and regional vision.

During the opening, Beatriz Pont, Global Training Team Lead at IIEP-UNESCO, reflected on the need to redefine the role of these actors in the current educational context and highlighted that with the necessary support and through a pedagogical leadership role, they can actively influence educational improvement. The event featured various experiences showing how different countries in the region are rethinking the role of middle-tier actors to achieve greater coherence between policies and what happens in schools. From Argentina, the Minister of Education of the Province of Córdoba, Horacio Ferreyra, shared the path the province is taking to strengthen educational supervision and consolidate more consistent territorial teams.

Uruguay’s experience provided a complementary perspective on how to consolidate the presence of middle-tier actors in the territories. Isabel Alende, National Coordinator of the Educational Training and Production Centre (CECAP, for its Spanish acronym), presented the experience of this programme and explained how it managed to consolidate itself as an educational policy aimed at vulnerable groups, even through changes in government. In this context, she emphasized that the sustainability of educational policies depends largely on the strength of these actors, who guarantee institutional continuity and close ties with educational communities.

Mariana Clucellas, Training Coordinator at IIEP-UNESCO in LAC, analyzed the importance of communication and the creation of shared meanings in the implementation of educational policies. In this context, she pointed out that middle-tier actors play a central role in contextualizing policies and maintaining feedback flows from the local to the central level. “A public policy is useless if it does not reach the school; that is why strong capacities for dialogue, listening, and working with other people are required.”

Gonzalo Muñoz, Specialist in Educational Policy Implementation Processes at Diego Portales University (Chile), provided data on the need to rethink the conditions and capacities of the middle tier. “We should look at the Chilean experience in detail, because we are creating a new middle-tier system and learning how to professionalize these levels with a view to the fundamental objective of improving educational quality, narrowing gaps and, above all, developing the capacities of educational actors,” he said.

Among the main challenges mentioned were the need to professionalize the role, strengthen pedagogical leadership capacities, and build regional learning communities that integrate strategic vision, knowledge of the territory, and support in schools.

IIEP-UNESCO in LAC: a partner for Latin American and Caribbean governments

Strengthening the middle tier requires not only institutional recognition but also spaces for training, reflection, and joint capacity building. To support the governments of the region, IIEP-UNESCO in LAC promotes various lines of work aimed at supporting ministries in the design, implementation, and evaluation of public policies. These include regular training courses on priority issues and tailor-made training proposals developed in collaboration with States to respond to the specific demands of national, provincial, or municipal governments. In addition to this offering, IIEP promotes a system of knowledge recognition that highlights the multiple learning outcomes achieved in training processes. This system, which consists of different types of certifications, makes it possible to highlight not only the learning outcomes of conceptual frameworks but also the development of specific skills related to professional practice, integrating them into broader and more consolidated training pathways.
IIEP-UNESCO

At the close of the panel, Vannina Trentin, Deputy Training Coordinator at IIEP-UNESCO in LAC and moderator of the panel of experiences, presented the knowledge recognition system, highlighting that it is the first of its kind promoted by UNESCO: “Our system does not end with the capacities that are built during training, but goes a step further by incorporating impact certification, identifying the capacities linked to implementation processes based on the concrete results achieved by IIEP graduates in their real-life contexts.”

Through these lines of work, IIEP-UNESCO in LAC works alongside States with a planning approach in which design and implementation are inseparable processes. Through the construction of a knowledge recognition system and the evaluation of the impact of training programmes, IIEP-UNESCO in LAC reinforces its commitment to the search for new and better ways to support the development of equitable, inclusive, and quality public education policies.