The school system in French-speaking Belgium is going through a large-scale reform, so-called “Le Pacte pour un Enseignement d’Excellence†(2015–2018). The idea of such a Pacte comes from the coalition agreement between socialists and Christian democrats following the 2014 elections. The two government partners agreed: “in order to identify the means to reach the objectives of improving the performances of our education system and of reducing the inequalities that influence the performances, the Government will propose “Le Pacte pour un Enseignement d’Excellence†that will be enacted for the next ten yearsâ€. Hence, the full process is intended to last longer than the current legislature. To this end, it is deemed key that all stakeholders support this large-scale policy reform. In order to reach such large adhesion to the Pacte, the whole policy-making process rests on a collaborative governance scheme. This means the implication of organized stakeholders and citizens. The former are representatives from unions of teachers, parents’ associations, experts, school directors, psychologists and representatives of the different schools’ networks. Together with the administration and the cabinet of the Minister of Education, they have formed transversal groups throughout the whole policy-making as well as 12 working groups during the policy formulation stage. In the agenda-setting stage, an external consultancy group, McKinsey, was mandated to collect and analyse large amounts of data in order to identify the problems and challenges facing the education system in French-speaking Belgium. It is also during the policy formulation stage that citizens and stakeholders have been involved in three mini-publics. For each of them, participants received briefing material explaining both the process and the content of the issues at stake. The deliberations took place in small groups that were facilitated by trained moderators who ensured the quality of the deliberations and helped all the participants to ...