Executive summary
Chile’s ongoing curriculum reforms reflect a broader global shift toward equipping students with broad or transversal skills—including critical thinking, collaboration, and socioemotional learning—that are essential for navigating complex social and economic realities. In Chile, these priorities are embedded in the Bases Curriculares, the national curriculum that defines learning objectives across subjects and grade levels and formally incorporates broad competencies as core goals. However, translating curricular commitments into consistent classroom practice remains a persistent challenge, impacted by the country’s profound socioeconomic and territorial inequalities, a misaligned accountability system, and an incomplete governance transition.
This report describes a study that examined how Chile’s education system is—and is not—creating conditions for broad skills development, drawing on evidence from five public schools across the country’s macro-zones. The study employed a sequential, qualitative research design structured in three phases: 1) national-level policy interviews with key actors across the Ministry of Education (Ministerio de Educación, MINEDUC), the Education Quality Agency (Agencia de Calidad de la Educación, ACE), the Public Education Directorate (Dirección de Educación Pública, DEP), and civil society organizations; 2) a content analysis of the current Bases Curriculares and the proposed Grades one through 10 update, coding learning objectives against four broad skills dimensions; and 3) in-depth school case studies in five public schools, one per macro-zone, each involving interviews with the principal and Technical-Pedagogical Support Unit (Unidad de Apoyo Técnico Pedagógico, UATP) coordinator as well as focus groups with teachers and students. The analysis was structured through the 3C framework, developed by the Center for Universal Education (CUE), which assesses the degree to which the system supports and prioritizes the development of broad skills (commitment), provides the tools and support needed for skills development (capacity), and maintains alignment across curriculum, assessment, teacher professional development, and governance (cohesion).
Findings revealed four interconnected themes: a lack of shared understanding around broad skills development, the burden and mismatch of the current curriculum and assessment structures, individual teacher initiatives that lack structural, system-wide support, and delayed implementation of administrative and structural supports. While individual commitment to broad skills development was genuine and present across actors and zones, it has not been institutionalized. Capacity exists in the form of teacher knowledge, locally generated innovation, and community-rooted practice, but is often self-generated and unevenly distributed, concentrated where teachers have independently sought training rather than where the system has intentionally built the conditions for transformation. The study also revealed that cohesion is the most fundamental missing condition for the integration of broad skills development in Chilean schools. Currently, there is no coherent framework linking curriculum expectations from the Bases Curriculares with teacher preparation, school support systems, and assessment practices. The result is fragmented implementation, with teachers left to interpret and operationalize the broad skills mandate individually, producing inconsistent opportunities for students across the system.
Based on the analysis of the findings using the 3C framework, the report’s four recommendations include aligning national assessments with the curriculum’s stated goals for broad skills development, building sustained and practice-oriented professional development systems for teachers, establishing a coherent implementation framework for broad competencies, and reorienting the UATP’s activities to provide greater pedagogical support across the system.
Authors
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Acknowledgements and disclosures
We want to thank the teams at the Public Education Directorate (Dirección de Educación Pública, DEP) for supporting our work with the Local Public Education Services (Servicios Locales de Educación Pública, SLEPs) and for facilitating access to schools. Also, we want to acknowledge the teams from the different SLEPs who contributed to this work: Gabriela Mistral, Magallanes, Llanquihue, Valparaíso, and Iquique. We also extend our appreciation to the authorities, researchers, principals, teachers, and students who took part in this research and contributed their knowledge and experiences.
We would also like to acknowledge the contribution of our peer reviewer, Michael Lisman, whose detailed feedback strengthened the conceptual clarity and methodological rigor of this report. We extend our thanks to Emily Gustafsson-Wright, senior fellow at the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at the Brookings Institution, for her editorial review.
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