This post was originally published by What Works Hub for Global Education.

Authors:
Sam Awuku, Deborah Kimathi, Siddesh Sarma, Modern Karema, Yue-Yi Hwa and Kholosa Nonkenge

There is increasing attention on the role of middle-tier officials – education system intermediaries between top decisionmakers and schools, who typically sit at the state, district, subdistrict level or similar – in implementing education policies at scale.

At the UKFIET Conference on 16–18 September 2025 in Oxford, one of several contributions to the discourse on the middle tier was a panel titled ‘Drivers of effectiveness in education systems: Understanding the dynamics of middle-tier support for improved education outcomes’.

The panel was chaired by Sam Awuku (Learning Generation Initiative), and the presenters were:

  • Deborah Kimathi (Learning Generation Initiative)
  • Siddesh Sarma (Leadership for Equity)
  • Modern Karema (STiR Education Uganda)
  • Yue-Yi Hwa (What Works Hub for Global Education)

The discussant was Kholosa Nonkenge (South Africa Department of Basic Education).

In this blog, we share one highlight from each speaker. Quotes have been edited lightly for readability.

1. Middle-tier officials cannot realise their potential unless they are supported both technically and relationally

Yue-Yi Hwa presented on a What Works Hub for Global Education synthesis brief titled ‘Entry points for supporting middle-tier officials in foundational learning reforms: Equip, connect, inform, empower’. This synthesis identified four entry points for supporting middle-tier officials to implement education reforms at scale, and found that inadequate support can be disempowering in both technical and relational ways:

To support middle-tier officials, we need to equip them with knowledge and resources to work towards foundational learning goals or their other educational goals. We need to connect them to a shared commitment to those goals. We need to inform them about progress toward those goals. Finally, we need to empower them to prioritise and adapt in line with those goals…

Each entry point has many technical elements, but each also has a ‘squishy’, human, motivational part. For the first entry point on equipping middle-tier officials with resources and knowledge, some examples of the technical part were mentioned in Deborah’s presentation. For example, middle-tier officials don’t have transport resources to visit schools. They have no internet access.

But there’s also a messier, motivational part. This came out in Modern’s presentation: when middle-tier officials are seen as only having experience and knowledge about primary school, this affects how they are perceived. This technical lack of equipping affects your relationship with the people in schools whom you are trying to monitor and support. So even something technical like knowledge and resources has a squishy, messy human bit.

For the full synthesis brief, see the What Works Hub for Global Education website.

2. In South Africa, middle-tier officials have limited training and travel resources, but some are trying to innovate amid these constraints

Deborah Kimathi presented on a Learning Generation Initiative mixed methods study of a school district in South Africa, titled ‘Dynamics of middle tier support in the South African education system: contextual and institutional influences’. The study found that middle-tier officials struggle to adequately support school leaders and teachers because they themselves have inadequate training, travel provisions and other resources.

Schools told us that it was important for instructional support to be localised: school-based, where possible. But this ideal is often challenged by limited resources, where the middle tier are not adequately resourced to travel frequently to schools. As a result, teachers were frustrated by a persistent lack of support…

Our research also surfaced innovation amongst middle-tier officers who were using tools like WhatsApp to facilitate communication and support. Middle-tier officers had to constantly pivot in response to resource constraints. For some, pivoting meant visiting a smaller selection of schools who they felt were most in need, and for others, it was finding these alternative channels of communication. Others worked to strategically cluster schools together for support or to strengthen peer-to-peer support mechanisms. But what we saw is that the middle tier needed further training to really lean into these innovative models of support.

The research also surfaced the need for the middle tier to focus support on school leaders. Due to the constraints faced by the middle tier, teachers were most dependent on their principals for instructional support and for professional development. Yet middle-tier actors were not necessarily equipped to effectively support school leaders.

For the full report, see the Learning Generation Initiative website.

3. Also in South Africa, education policymakers are working to reduce redundancies and reallocate pent-up capacity in the middle tier

In her remarks, discussant Kholosa Nonkenge spoke about the South Africa Department of Basic Education’s work on a structured pedagogy programme called the Early Grade Reading Study. One insight from the programme is that existing policies and programmes had led to some duplication of coaching roles on paper, with limited impact on teachers in practice.

The government has said that they can’t afford external coaches, so we were looking at how to help existing system actors take on some coaching responsibilities. And we found that subject advisors at the district level, circuit managers at the subdistrict level, and department heads at the school level all have classroom observation roles. Some of them have also said that they do coach and mentor teachers – but this may not be ‘coaching’ as we have defined it within the goal of implementing structured pedagogy to improve learner outcomes…

Each subject advisor is responsible for 300 to 400 schools. There are schools that have never been visited by a subject advisor. So we are not going to be unrealistic and say that subject advisors must coach. Within-school department heads also face barriers to coaching. They are themselves teachers: they have an administrative burden, and relational dynamics make coaching complicated…

So we try to find alternatives. We try to influence the personnel administrative policy to increase the number of times that circuit managers can go into class, or to provide training support for them to be able to provide more targeted support for teachers in the classroom.

For more on this line of work by the Department of Basic Education, see ‘Subject advisor study: can instructional coaching be integrated into South Africa’s education system? A study of external coaches, subject advisors, and department heads’.

4. In India, a non-governmental organisation has found that providing demand-driven support can lead to strong middle tier engagement

Siddesh Sarma presented some lessons learned by the Indian NGO Leadership for Equity, in a presentation titled ‘Driving systems change through the middle-tier: Lessons from Haryana’. By responding to the preferences of the middle tier, the Leadership for Equity team helped to drive gradual but deep change:

The State Council for Education Research and Training in Haryana reached out to us in 2021. They needed help with improving the quantity and quality of e-content on the national repository called Diksha… Because we take a systemic approach, we worked towards that goal with a combination of policy, process, practices at a structural level – and also at a relational level, with the hope that some mental models could be shifted…

If we look back at this partnership, we started at a point where middle-tier decisionmakers in the education system had high demand for something – which may not necessarily have been the most well-advised thing to do, but they wanted it. So we started with e-content. And we were gradually able to incorporate other interventions that the system needs – aspects of academic leadership, digital governance, and teacher mentoring.

We engaged in a lot of co-working, collaboration and true learning from each other – for example, I learned a lot about public administration, public communication and electoral dynamics. And through multiple loops of responding to where the demand was, building credibility and buy-in by demonstrating results, we were able to move the system to somewhere that is more evidence-based.

For more on Leadership for Equity’s work in Haryana, see their webpage on Leading education transformation through digital learning initiatives.

5. In Uganda, some middle-tier officials are taking ownership of their roles in helping teachers to thrive

Modern Karema from STiR Education Uganda gave a presentation titled ‘Motivational leadership: The role of mid-tier officials in helping teachers thrive’. He closed his presentation with three stories of middle-tier leaders who are driving change within their remits. Here is one of the stories:

In one school district in Uganda, the new district education officer had invited headteachers to come for the training for our STiR Education programme. Now, when she went to give opening remarks to officiate the training, she found out that the people that were in the room were not headteachers. All the headteachers had delegated the training to classroom teachers. So she called us at head office and said, ‘I thought the district training is supposed to be for headteachers.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘So why do I have only delegates and all of them are classroom teachers? How are the schools going to own the program if I only have classroom teachers?’ So instead of opening the training, she closed it.

And she wrote all her head teachers and asked them to come the following week now for a new training session. She took them through the ‘why’ of the programme – why teacher capacity development was important – and she sat with them for the whole two-day training. And when it was done, she now told them, ‘Now you can go and train your teachers.’

That’s an example of a middle tier manager taking ownership.

For more on STiR Education’s work in Uganda, see the STiR Uganda homepage.

Conclusion: the middle tier is central to improving education for all children

To conclude with the words of the panel chair, Sam Awuku:

The middle tier is so critical to ensure policies are effectively implemented and adapted in the local level and to facilitate feedback loops which allows policymakers to refine strategies based on what actually happens in schools…We cannot be talking about holistic education provision, strengthening education systems, and improving learning outcomes if we do not pay particular attention to the middle.

Awuku, S., Kimathi, D., Sarma, S., Karema, M., Hwa, YY. & Nonkenge, K. Drivers of effectiveness in education systems: An UKFIET panel on the role of the middle tier in implementing education change. What Works Hub for Global Education. Blog. 2025/030. https://doi.org/10.35489/BSG-WhatWorksHubforGlobalEducation-BL_2025/030