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Yali Horta Hurtado

Yali is an attendance coordinator at Fundación Educacional Oportunidad in Chile. In 2008, she obtained her master’s degree in Elementary Education at the University of Miami and worked for 10 years in the field of early childhood and primary education in English as a foreign language in her country. Nowadays, she works and learns from educational leaders who want to improve school attendance, engaging and empowering all stakeholders in the process.

The menus below were updated in July 2025. If you have information to share with others in your country, please contact Yali at yhorta@fundacionoportunidad.cl.

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Not for profit

  • Fundación Educacional Oportunidad (Opportunity Educational Foundation) is a civil society organization that promotes the development and learning of children and adolescents, from early childhood, innovating and working collaboratively with others. Its programs focus on the continuous improvement of pedagogical practices and leadership of teams in public schools in Chile. For more information about the foundation contact.
  • Since 2012, “The school attendance program�? of the Fundación Oportunidad has provided educational teams and leadership in public schools with tools and strategies to increase class attendance and reduce chronic absenteeism in early education. Currently, 151 schools and 839 kindergartens participate in the program, benefiting 13,785 children in Chile. For more information contact the head of the program Yanira Alee
  • Fundación Presente (Presente Foundation): “Cada día cuenta�? initiative of Fundación Presente was born in 2014 aiming to increase the involvement of students in their learning and thus reducing the high levels of chronic absenteeism. A team of professionals who are experts in education and educational psychology advise school communities by working directly with all members of the school team. To date, they have advised more than 150 schools and high schools in different regions of the country. For further information about the foundation contact.
  • Catedras UNESCO, a project of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization aims to advance and improve the development of research, training, and programmes in higher education, through the construction of university networks and the promotion of cooperation between universities through the transfer of knowledge across borders.
  • Belén Educa is a non-profit Catholic foundation, dependent on the Archbishopric of Santiago, which was created in 2000 to provide quality education in vulnerable sectors. With a strong focus on promoting school attendance and the use of data to tackle and prevent chronic absenteeism, Belén Educa encourages children to attend every day to classes with a family of superheroes and the motto “When I attend, I learn”.
  • Fundación Educacional Arauco is a private, non-profit foundation that has supported educational communities in the south-central region of the country since 1989, with a primary focus on public education. Its mission is to contribute to giving greater development opportunities to children and young people through education. For this, it deploys different lines of work, the main one being the development of educational and cultural improvement programs. Their motto is: “We believe in teachers.�? Desafío TEP which arose from a public- private alliance between the Arauco Educational Foundation, the Andalién Sur Local Public Education Service (SLEP), and the Center for Advanced Research in Education (CIAE) constitutes a pilot initiative to follow the educational path and reduce school exclusion in 12 of the Andalién Sur SLEP schools. The project design allows for continuous improvement processes before scaling up to the rest of the schools and replicating the experience in other SLEPs in the country.


Government:

  • Chilean Ministry of Education (MINEDUC) is the governing body of the State in charge of promoting the development of education at all levels, through a democratic humanist education of excellence, open to the world at all levels of education. The mission of the Ministry of Education is to ensure an inclusive high-quality education system that contributes to the integral and permanent formation of people and the development of the country. This is accomplished through the formulation and implementation of different policies, norms, and regulations in different areas. Through a system of registration, analysis, and decision-making for the promotion of school attendance, the reduction of chronic absenteeism is achieved.


Academic institution:

  • Centro de Investigación avanzada en Educación (CIAE)(Centre for Advanced Research in Education): Since 2008, The Centre has sought to provide an interdisciplinary and integrating perspective through a fruitful dialogue between researchers from different areas of knowledge. Educators, sociologists, economists, engineers, mathematicians, doctors and psychologists from different faculties and institutes of Chilean universities participate in the Centre’s activities. Its mission is to produce and disseminate knowledge in the field of education and provide scientific support to the discussion and design of public policies in the educational area. Thus, national policies, local educational management and classroom teaching are based on the evidence generated by research. Additionally, it contributes to preparing the new generation of young researchers in the field of education.


Chilean academics and specialists in the field of school attendance:

    • Juan Pablo Valenzuela, associate researcher at CIAE and Adjunct Professor of the Department of Economics at the University of Chile. His main research areas are the economics of education, social inequality and school attendance.
    • Mahia Saracostti Schwartzman, Social worker and PhD in social welfare. Director of the Catedras UNESCO on children/youth, education and society. Full professor, University of Valparaíso, researcher at the University of La Frontera.
    • Fundación Educacional Oportunidad:
      For fifteen years, the academics and specialists from the team at Fundación Educacional Oportunidad have worked to improve the quality of education in Chile. Through the implementation and evaluation of educational programs focused on language and school attendance of children in early childhood:

Activities:

  • 2025 July 25 Every Day Counts. How can we continue to reduce school absence? Join Professor Carolina Gonvález to explore national and international evidence-based strategies to support attendance. Register here.
  • We have also launched a YouTube Channel. Please hit ‘subscribe’ to stay updated with our content.

Achievements:

  • 2023, Fundación Presente is awarded a social impact contract (CIS) to implement the “Cada día cuenta ” (every day counts) program free of charge in 20 schools in the country during the years 2023 and 2024 to promote attendance and address chronic school absenteeism and promote retention by ensuring positive school trajectories.
  • 2022: A paper led by Carolina Soto from Fundación Oportunidad describes the context of Chile and its educational system; the definition, recording, reporting and use of attendance data; and the methods, results and lessons learned by the Regional Learning Network UBC, which is a special edition published by the International Network for School Attendance (INSA) and the academic journal Orbis Scholae.
  • 2022 December: A group of researchers from Harvard University and Fundación Educacional Oportunidad used the data provided by the Ministry of Education (MINEDUC) of more than 60,000 children between the years 2011 and 2017 and compared the differences in the evolution of absenteeism and chronic absenteeism between schools in the VI region of Chile. Mary-Catherine Arbour 
  • Since 2022, The school attendance program of Fundacion Oportunidad begins the animated series that is aimed at children in early education. The protagonist of the series is the character Super attendance, who promotes class attendance using the motto “You have to be there to learn”.
  • In 2022, a team from the CIAE of the University of Chile and the School of Government of the Catholic University developed a national survey to monitor schools during the pandemic, aiming to gather information on how the year is going from schools in initial, primary and secondary education, in order to provide information on school attendance to the educational community and education policy teams for decision-making.
  • In order to reverse the high levels of serious absenteeism in Chilean students, since 2022 MINEDUC is implementing the attendance and permanence promotion program in all schools in the country. Through this programme, superintendents and educational teams will be able to receive bimonthly reports on each child’s absences and academic disengagement. As a result, the knowledge will make it possible to develop work plans based on data, fine-tune targeted actions, and receive assistance from MINEDUC educational teams.
  • Since 2020, the “Desafío trayectorias Escolares Positivas (TEP)? (Positive School Trajectories Challenge) initiative has been carried out, an alliance made between Servicio Local de Educación Pública Andalién Sur, Fundación Educacional Arauco y Centro de investigación Avanzada en Educación (CIAE) de la Universidad de Chile to mobilize capacities and practices for the planning, implementation and definition of strategies that promote school trajectories. It is hoped that this project will influence their engagement and school attendance, keeping them engaged and participating in quality learning experiences.
  • Promoting positive educational trajectories has been an enormous challenge for schools in Chile. To support this challenge, from 2020 to 2022 a research team led by Dr Mahia Saracostti designed the Integrated System for Evaluation, Monitoring and Strategies for the Promotion of School Engagement and Contextual Factors (SIESE) inspired by evidence on ways to promote School Engagement in the student body.
  • Since 2020, the Fundación Oportunidad has been working with La Junta Nacional de Jardines Infantiles (JUNJI), one of the largest and most significant providers of public early childhood education in Chile, with the aim of transferring the strategies and methodologies for promoting assistance that have been tested by the foundation. The institution has incorporated and adjusted the model at a national level. Currently, 333 kindergartens participate, benefiting 6,468 children. For further information about this local experience visit the following.
  • 2019: The “School Attendance” course is launched for all educators, early childhood education technicians, and principal teams from all over the country in order to disseminate the school attendance programme of Fundación Oportunidad to other organisations in the country. To sign up for the course, click on the following link.
  • 2019, The programme “Cada día cuenta�? of Fundación Presente reduced the percentage of students with chronic absenteeism by an average of 30% and increased school attendance by 2%. This has been through a team of specialists who accompany, guide, model, and design strategies and actions with the attendance committee of each school. The programme aims to change the committee’s attitudes towards participation and work with them to lead the cultural transformation of the school community by establishing management practices and promoting school attendance. Memoria 2019
  • In 2015, the “Inter-institutional Table for School attendance,” organised by Fundación Oportunidad in collaboration with other educational institutions, focused on developing practical recommendations that would affect the educational policies of the Chilean educational system. Many strategic work sessions were held to accomplish this, resulting in various official documents being produced and sent to the authorities related to the field.
  • 2015 June: In order to combat “chronic absenteeism” in kindergartens and raise awareness of the value of daily attendance, Fundación Educacional Oportunidad launched the “Basta de yo no fui” campaign in June 2015. To learn more about the campaign, visit the following links.
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