The Chilean Pingüino movement — composed by secondary school students and named after their black and white school uniforms — emerged in late April 2006. Demanding quality education and the newly elected President Michelle Bachelet to ‘stop postponing their future’, the strength acquired by the Pingüinos forced a significant discussion on the education system and a set of education reforms that had been deemed as unlikely to pursue just a year before. The paper examines the political impact of the 2006 Pingüino movement. Analysing the way in which the students’ demands were channelled institutionally, I identify the main informal and formal institutional constraints that the students faced when seeking to influence the policy-making of education. I conclude that while the Pingüino movement had a clear impact on the education agenda, informal constraints, expressed by the weight of the technocratic discourse in the Presidential Advisory Commission that was created to channel its demands, and formal constraints, such as the lack of political representation in the parliament, restricted its impact on concrete policy outcomes. So, while the Pingüinos’ mobilization efforts produced a significant shift on the policy agenda, their resources in the form of expertise and political alliances were insufficient to have an impact in the later stages of the policy-making process that followed the protests put forward by the movement.
