A rosy narrative on decentralising school management is not helpful

The narrative of a success story about reaching near-universal enrolment and closing the gender gap in primary education in Bangladesh is quite justified, but the achievement itself is neither exceptional nor improbable, as is sometimes claimed. An acceleration in the enrolment of both girls and boys in low-income countries globally has been the larger picture since the onset of the “Education for All” movement in the 1990s. The disappointment is that this growth in numbers has not been matched by children acquiring the basic skills of reading, writing and counting. Bangladesh and most low-income countries are struggling to overcome this schooling-without-learning challenge. The term “learning poverty,” indicating the proportion of children who cannot read a simple text in the national language, has sadly become a key descriptor of education systems in many countries.

Clearly, there is no magic potion that can remedy the persistent problem of schooling without learning or mitigate learning poverty. As I explained in a previous article published by this daily, a focus on student learning achievements has specific implications for teacher preparation and school management, as well as for system governance, public investment and accountability, and ensuring acceptable quality for all children. It also has implications for a common core curriculum and learning content for all children, as well as assessment systems that provide a credible picture of what children learn. 

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The management of primary and secondary school education in Bangladesh is among the most centralised in the world, given the size of its enrolment and number of institutions. All major aspects of running a government-funded school—curriculum and learning content, teaching personnel, school calendar and teaching hours, infrastructure and facilities, student evaluation, and financing and budgets—are strictly regulated by laws, rules and directives from the divisions of two education ministries and a plethora of other bodies at the central level. Little room is left for schools to plan and manage education activities, teaching personnel and school budgets in order to make schools adaptive and responsive to the needs and circumstances of children and families in each community. There is no such thing as area-based planning of school education with a headcount of all children in an upazila to ensure that all of them are adequately served.

Yes, rhetorical support for greater authority and responsibility at the school and community level has been expressed in policy statements such as the National Education Policy 2010. This aspect of the policy has never been translated into operational measures, however. This is part of a larger picture of the state of politics and governance in Bangladesh. The ruling oligarchy comprising the political class, the business class, and the higher civil and military bureaucracy finds the highly unitary and centralised governance structure advantageous for itself. Article 59 of the Constitution of Bangladesh provides for local government bodies composed of elected representatives to carry out functions related to public order, public services and economic development. But this article is being continuously violated with the tacit consent of all major political parties.

In response to demands for decentralised school management, a small flat grant of Tk 20,000 per school per year was approved in 2009 to allow schools to buy learning materials and stationery while covering minor repairs and maintenance. No such fund was available to schools at that time. The grant was gradually increased under the Third Primary Education Development Program (PEDP3) and the PEDP4 to an amount of Tk 50,000-Tk 70,000, depending on the size of the school. This was called SLIP (or School Level Improvement Plan). The decision-makers, however, seemed to have overlooked the irony that a “slip” can also mean a careless or accidental mistake.

If SLIP was meant to be an initiative to change the historic practice and culture of top-down decisions regarding teaching-learning, teacher management, school maintenance, and student assessment, and to shift authority and decision-making down to the school level, its design and implementation were not up to the task.

Moreover, even after the increase in the per-school annual grant to Tk 50,000 to Tk 70,000, the SLIP grant amounts to one to two percent of the total government spending for a school. According to the primary and mass education ministry’s Annual Sector Performance Report (ASPR) 2024, the total government expenditure per primary school student was Tk 17,613 in FY2023-24. The annual SLIP grant for an average government primary school enrolling 200-250 students translates to Tk 200 to Tk 300 per student. Up to 99 percent of public primary education spending is controlled centrally—mainly for teacher salaries, infrastructure, textbook distribution and administrative overhead—about which schools have no say.

Even the tiny amount available at schools is subject to detailed rules and restrictions, with many layers of control from the upazila education office to the central ministry level for approval of spending proposals and the actual transfer of funds. The grant, paid as reimbursement after the school provides documentation for spending the money according to an approved plan, has added to delays, red tape and scope for corruption. The most recent 2023 guideline for the SLIP grant is a 24-page, closely printed document detailing the procedures and formalities to be followed by the school. Thus, SLIP may be described as a highly centralised project to promote decentralisation.

By equating the transfer of a tiny fraction of school financing to schools (under various restrictions, no less) with greater authority and responsibility at the school and community level, SLIP limits and distorts the concept of decentralisation. One cannot help but wonder whether there is a lack of understanding of decentralised education governance among policymakers, or whether there is deliberate resistance to meaningful decentralisation.

The fifth phase of the Primary Education Development Program (PEDP5) is supposed to have begun in July this year. SLIP is again being seen as the mechanism for providing schools with expanded autonomy, shifting the emphasis from basic physical maintenance towards interventions directly linked to improving student learning, foundational literacy and numeracy, and climate-resilient school environments. A SLIP effectiveness study commissioned by the Directorate of Primary Education and Unicef was undertaken by the Power and Participation Research Centre (PPRC). A policy brief based on the study ambiguously concludes that SLIP has “not failed” but it has “drastically underperformed its own design potential.” The single largest reason for the drastic underperformance is seen to be the fact that “SLIP still operates on a reimbursement basis.” (“Why Bangladesh’s schools need financial autonomy,” The Daily Star, August 1, 2026).

It is disappointing that the PPRC policy brief based on the SLIP effectiveness study argues that an administrative detail—reimbursement versus advance payment—can determine whether decentralisation reforms succeed or fail. The brief further states, “As Bangladesh mulls the launch of PEDP5, more than any grand design… shifting from a reimbursement principle to one of advance payment is what now stands between Bangladesh’s primary schools and the learning outcomes its enrolment statistics have long promised but not yet delivered.” It thus reduces the concept of decentralisation of education governance and school management to a minor technical fix regarding the transfer of a small amount of funding to schools.

The effectiveness study itself implies that decentralised school management is much more than transferring a small amount of funding to schools and that SLIP’s scope and procedures do not match its objectives. Given the current circumstances, what Bangladesh needs is not merely a better mechanism for administering SLIP, but a genuine rethinking of how primary education is governed and managed to improve learning outcomes. Meaningful decentralisation would give schools and communities real authority, resources and responsibility needed to respond to local needs, but within a framework that safeguards common standards and equity.

Dr Manzoor Ahmed is emeritus professor at BRAC University, chair at Bangladesh ECD Network (BEN), and adviser to Campaign for Popular Education (CAMPE). Views expressed in the article are his own.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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