3 de November de 2026
How can pedagogical guidelines be translated into effective changes in professional practice, and how can those changes be sustained over time? This is the central question of the new Policy Brief released by the Education Laboratory (LabEdu), with support from the Bracell Foundation. Titled Implementation Model for Early Childhood Education Policies under a Collaborative Governance Arrangement: The Maranhão Experience, the publication systematizes lessons learned from an at-scale implementation experience and presents recommendations for managers and technical teams in state and municipal governments.
The document draws on the partnership developed between LabEdu and the Maranhão State Department of Education (SEDUC-MA) between 2021 and 2025 to implement the Early Childhood Education strand of the Pact for Learning across Maranhão’s 217 municipalities. The initiative structured a strategy to support municipal education networks, bringing together continuing professional development, monitoring of pedagogical practices, and the development of technical capacities at different levels of the education system.
The experience starts from a challenge shared by public education networks across the country: differences in municipalities’ technical, administrative, and financial conditions for implementing Early Childhood Education policies. In this context, the collaborative governance arrangement enables states to play a coordinating and support role, helping to reduce inequalities and strengthen municipal networks’ implementation capacity.
Training and monitoring as part of implementation
One of the main lessons systematized in the publication is the importance of organizing a permanent support structure for education networks, with responsibilities distributed across the state, regional, and municipal levels.
In Maranhão, the model combined three components: governance and territorial support, continuing professional development in cycles, and monitoring integrated into implementation. The strategy relied on professionals dedicated to Early Childhood Education in regional education units and in municipalities, responsible for delivering the training, following up with institutions, and producing information to guide policy development.
Continuing professional development was organized into successive cycles of study, planning, experimentation, and reflection on pedagogical practices, with a focus on language development and the quality of interactions between adults and children. Monitoring, aligned with the training, made it possible to identify progress and support needs, producing evidence to guide subsequent cycles.
The recommendations are reinforced by the findings of a study conducted by LabEdu, under the supervision of Professor Carrie Conaway of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and with support from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS).
The study analyzed 1,383 observations of pedagogical practices involving 593 teachers from 181 municipalities in Maranhão between 2024 and 2025. The results point to a positive association between the quality of teaching practices and the complexity of the actions carried out by children. In the situations observed, higher-quality pedagogical interactions were associated with more opportunities for children to explain, narrate, formulate hypotheses, express opinions, and make connections.
The findings underscore the importance of connecting the professional development of teams to the systematic monitoring of practices, bringing management decisions closer to the daily life of Early Childhood Education institutions.
Lessons for strengthening public policies
The publication highlights that implementing a policy at scale requires building institutional capacities that ensure its continuity. This involves training professionals, defining responsibilities, securing resources, and embedding knowledge, materials, and monitoring tools into public structures.
In Maranhão, this process enabled SEDUC-MA to take full ownership of the technical management of the policy after the cooperation with LabEdu concluded in 2025.
Based on this experience, the Policy Brief presents five recommendations for states and municipalities, ranging from strengthening state coordination and establishing territorial support networks to organizing training cycles, using monitoring to guide decisions, and institutionalizing the capacities developed throughout implementation.
The lessons learned also contribute to the debate on the operationalization of the National Commitment to Quality and Equity in Early Childhood Education (Conaquei), established by the Ministry of Education in 2025, particularly with regard to federative coordination, professional development, and addressing territorial inequalities.
By bringing together evidence, challenges, and recommendations, the publication offers references for managers and technical teams to reflect on implementation strategies suited to different contexts, with the goal of continuously improving quality and equity in Early Childhood Education.