Across contemporary education systems, pedagogical support has become a central strategy for school improvement and quality assurance, particularly through the strengthening of middle-tier governance. While the literature does not offer a fully standardised terminology, pedagogical support can be understood as a set of actions external to the school aimed at strengthening, in sustained and contextualised ways, the professional and institutional capacities of school leaders and teachers through guidance, advice, and evidence-informed feedback (Rodríguez Espinoza, 2023; Vermeir & Kelchtermans, 2022; Thessin, 2019). Recent scholarship emphasises its continuous and situated character: rather than isolated interventions, support is enacted through systematic processes that accompany schools’ work cycles and adapt to organisational cultures and local conditions (Edwards-Groves et al., 2025).

This evolution reflects broader shifts in improvement research away from linear knowledge-transfer models towards collaborative professional learning and capacity-building approaches, where the aim is to develop sustainable internal conditions for improvement within organisations (Harris & Hopkins, 2001; Stosich, 2020). From this perspective, the effectiveness of support depends less on the mechanical application of protocols and more on the relational quality of interactions, professional trust, and the relevance of strategies mobilised in practice (Thessin, 2019; Vermeir & Kelchtermans, 2022). Accordingly, the professionalisation of those who provide support becomes critical, as these roles require pedagogical expertise, sensitivity to organisational change processes, and the capacity to foster reflective dialogue and professional learning (Goldring et al., 2020a).

Middle-tier organisations and actors have therefore gained prominence as key sites of mediation between policy and practice. Support work is increasingly conceptualised as a form of intermediary or boundary-spanning practice, in which support agents navigate insider–outsider dynamics, connect system levels, translate policy expectations into situated practice, and coordinate across overlapping mandates (Coburn et al., 2008; Vermeir & Kelchtermans, 2020). At the same time, this work is frequently shaped by structural tensions between accountability and improvement, collaboration and control, and evaluation and developmental support—often resulting in hybrid roles and ambiguous expectations for those providing support (Honig & Rainey, 2014; Meyers et al., 2024; Rogers, 2022). These tensions highlight that pedagogical support is not merely a technical function but an inherently interpretive form of professional work requiring judgement and negotiation in context (Kelchtermans, 2009).

Against this background, the paper examines Chile’s national pedagogical support system as a particularly instructive case for international audiences. Ongoing reforms have expanded and professionalised the middle tier through the creation of Local Education Services, while maintaining parallel support and quality-assurance functions within ministerial and oversight bodies. This configuration has produced a densely regulated “ecology of improvement” characterised by multiple actors, overlapping mandates, and tightly sequenced annual improvement cycles (Tournier et al., 2023). The study is guided by two questions: How is pedagogical support conceived and enacted within a multi-level governance system? How do structural conditions interact to shape the enactment of support in such systems?

The paper’s conceptual contribution lies in advancing a layered and relational lens for analysing pedagogical support systems. Rather than treating support as a linear chain from policy design to implementation, the paper conceptualises support as the outcome of multiple, intertwined layers operating simultaneously: national improvement rationales and policy designs; institutional roles and coordination across quality assurance bodies; local organisational capacities and resource conditions; and the professional judgement exercised by support actors in their everyday work with schools (Stosich, 2020; Thessin, 2019). These layers are woven together in practice, shaping how schools experience support and whether it is perceived as formative, fragmented, or compliance-oriented. This framing contributes to international debates on educational improvement by highlighting how coherence, professional judgement, and institutional architecture are co-constructed in systems where accountability, improvement, and innovation agendas intersect.

This paper draws on a mixed-methods research design that combines policy analysis, survey data, and qualitative case studies to examine how pedagogical support is conceived and enacted across the levels of a complex governance system. The study was conducted as part of a national research programme on pedagogical support in Chile’s public education system. First, a document analysis was conducted to reconstruct the formal design and improvement logic of the national support system. The corpus includes policy frameworks, legal regulations, technical guidelines, operational instruments, and planning tools produced by the Ministry of Education and the Public Education Directorate. These documents were analysed to identify underlying assumptions about improvement, roles and responsibilities, coordination mechanisms, and expected modes of support. Second, national survey data were collected from school leaders and pedagogical support professionals across the public education system. The survey gathered information on the organisation, focus, intensity, and perceived orientation of support, as well as role perceptions and coordination across institutions. Descriptive and comparative analyses were used to identify variation across territories and actor groups, providing system-level insight into how support is structured and experienced. Third, five in-depth territorial case studies were conducted in Local Education Services (SLEPs), selected to represent diverse institutional trajectories, geographic contexts, and socio-educational conditions. Each case study combined semi-structured interviews with intermediate-level support professionals, school leaders, and relevant institutional actors, along with observations and analysis of local planning documents and support instruments. Finally, 24 semi-structured interviews were conducted with national-level policymakers, senior technical staff involved in the design and coordination of pedagogical support, and other key institutional actors within the support system. These interviews provided insight into policy rationales, intended complementarities between institutions, and perceived implementation challenges. Data analysis followed an iterative and abductive strategy. Qualitative materials were coded thematically using a shared analytical framework informed by the research questions and relevant literature. The framework comprised interrelated analytical categories addressing: (a) the design and underlying theory of change of the pedagogical support system; (b) organisational structures, roles, and coordination mechanisms across institutional levels; (c) implementation of support practices in territorial contexts, including modalities and focal areas; (d) structural and contextual conditions shaping implementation, such as resources, workload, and professional development; and (e) actors’ interpretations, experiences, and attributed effects of support. Quantitative and qualitative findings were triangulated across data sources and system levels to analyse coherence, variation, and interaction between institutional arrangements and professional practice.

The paper extends existing work on policy enactment by conceptualising pedagogical support as a distinctive governance practice emerging from the interaction of multiple, intertwined layers. These include national improvement rationales and policy designs; institutional roles and coordination across quality assurance bodies; local organisational capacities and resource conditions; and the professional judgement exercised by support actors in their everyday work with schools. This layered perspective highlights that tensions between accountability and improvement are not merely implementation failures but are structurally embedded in the architecture of support systems, particularly in contexts characterised by strong regulation and multiple oversight actors. Using Chile’s national pedagogical support system as an analytically rich case, the study examines how recent reforms have expanded and professionalised the middle tier through Local Education Services while maintaining parallel support and accountability functions within ministerial and oversight bodies. This configuration has produced a densely regulated ecology of improvement marked by overlapping mandates, multiple actors, and tightly sequenced annual improvement cycles. The analysis enables a critical examination of both the potential and the limits of new institutional arrangements intended to bring support closer to schools and foster more continuous and collaborative improvement processes. It also draws attention to how improvement models grounded in international evidence can become overly standardised when translated into prescriptive support frameworks. By foregrounding the interplay between professional capacities and structural conditions in regulated improvement systems, the paper contributes to broader debates on how education systems balance standardisation, coherence, and professional agency. It shows that sustaining meaningful pedagogical support depends on both the capacity of intermediate-level actors to interpret and mediate expectations and enabling conditions such as clear mandates, coordination, time, and staffing. The study offers conceptually grounded insights for policymakers, system leaders, and researchers concerned with strengthening the formative potential of middle-tier support across diverse governance contexts.

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