hen the Punjab Cabinet quietly amended the Punjab School Management Council Policy 2024 on February 26, through six clauses, the language appeared legal. But the political meaning was unmistakable: the provincial government had effectively withdrawn from one of the few meaningful experiments in devolved financial authority in the public education system.

The 2024 policy had allowed School Management Councils to spend up to Rs 2.5 million annually on civil works and major repairs. More importantly, it had exempted these expenditures from cumbersome procurement rules, PPRA procedures, GST deductions and income tax requirements. School-level decisions and infrastructure development plans could finally be made at school level. Head-teachers and community representatives could identify urgent needs, approve works, release funds and execute projects without waiting for distant bureaucratic approvals.

In practical terms, it was a modest but significant transfer of power from the provincial bureaucrats to the school heads and SMCs.

Now, that experiment has been rolled back.

The issue is not merely about procurement procedures or financial regulations. It is about the deeper political culture of governance in the Punjab and Pakistan: a persistent refusal to trust communities, headteachers and local institutions with real authority. The ending of SMC financial autonomy reflects the historical instinct of the state authorities to centralise decision-making, retain control over public funds and keep administrative power concentrated within provincial departments and bureaucratic hierarchies. Another hallmark of this bureaucratic centralisation is to resist transparency. The rollback of SMC financial autonomy occurred without meaningful public explanation, parliamentary debate or published evidence. This absence of official public justification naturally put the rationale and credibility of the policy decision in question.

Pakistan’s education system was built on centralised governance from the very beginning. From the education policies of 1947 through the late 1980s, education expansion remained entirely state-led. Communities had virtually no role in governance. Schools were run through bureaucratic chains where authority flowed downward from provincial capitals, not upward from citizens.

In the 1990s, under pressure from international donors and global decentralisation trends, Pakistan began introducing concepts such as School Management Councils, Parent Teacher Associations and Village Education Committees. The idea was simple: schools function better when parents and communities participate in oversight and decision-making. Community involvement could improve accountability, reduce absenteeism, strengthen ownership and respond quickly to local needs.

For more than three decades, governments repeatedly introduced these community structures while refusing to empower them.

This contradiction defines the history of SMCs in Pakistan. Every policy document praises community participation. Every reform framework speaks of ownership, accountability and local governance. In practice, however, decision-making remains centralised at the provincial levels. SMCs have remained largely symbolic bodies, often confined to signing papers, holding occasional meetings or implementing minor tasks without meaningful authority over finances, staffing or planning.

The Punjab SMC Policy 2024 briefly disrupted this tradition. For perhaps the first time at scale, schools received a meaningful degree of financial flexibility. Head-teachers were designated as principal accounting officers. Jointly operated SMC accounts gave community representatives a formal role in oversight. Three-tier audit mechanisms were introduced, including internal audits, district-level random audits and independent provincial audits. SMCs’ significant potential was evident in appropriate and low financial costing of school infrastructure at the local level than those planned and implemented by communication and public works departments.

Critics of decentralisation often argue that SMCs lack the capacity to manage funds transparently. The 2024 policy attempted to address those concerns through layered accountability systems. The issue, therefore, was never simply about corruption or oversight. It was about who gets to exercise control over public money.

In Pakistan’s governance culture, control over development funds is inseparable from administrative power and political influence. Once schools could independently undertake civil works worth millions of rupees, a portion of financial authority moved away from the departments and bodies linked with public works and engineering services, procurement systems and contractor networks traditionally centred in provincial bureaucracies.

This is where the politics of centralisation becomes visible.

Public sector construction and repair projects are not merely technical exercises; they are part of an administrative economy involving engineers, contractors, approvals, tenders and departmental procedures. Centralised procurement systems create institutional control over where funds go, who executes projects and which bureaucratic layers remain relevant. Financial decentralisation threatens these entrenched arrangements because it bypasses administrative gatekeeping.

When a school can repair or build its boundary wall, classrooms, toilets or water supply through locally supervised spending, it reduces dependence on departmental engineering and contracting chains. It also weakens the culture of delays where schools wait months or years for approvals from distant offices unfamiliar with ground realities.

The rollback of SMC autonomy, therefore, signals more than a policy amendment. It reflects the resilience of a bureaucratic mindset that remains uncomfortable with devolving real authority to local communities.

Supporters of centralised control may argue that SMCs in Pakistan have historically suffered from elite capture, weak training, dummy memberships and poor transparency. These problems are real. Policy reviews, including the National Education Policy 2009 and later reform assessments, repeatedly acknowledged that many SMCs remained inactive or ineffective.

But these failures themselves were products of weak devolution rather than excessive devolution.

For decades, SMCs were denied meaningful powers, given minimal resources, poorly trained and treated as donor-driven appendages rather than integral governance institutions. Communities were expected to participate without being trusted. Naturally, many committees became inactive because symbolic participation rarely generates ownership.

The lesson from international experience is not that decentralisation does not work; it is that decentralisation without financial authority fails.

Real community ownership emerges when local actors believe that their decisions matter. A parent who helps decide how school funds are spent is more likely to monitor attendance, challenge teacher absenteeism or advocate for enrollment. A head-teacher with financial discretion can respond immediately to infrastructure emergencies rather than navigating months of paperwork. Local decision-making creates both responsibility and accountability because citizens can directly observe outcomes.

The tragedy of the Punjab’s rollback is that it reinforces a longstanding distrust of people at the frontline of public education. The state continues to assume that decision-making is the safest when concentrated in high offices. Yet the schools themselves - their head-teachers, parents and communities - are the primary actors most directly affected by educational decline.

No department in the provincial capital understands the daily operational realities of thousands of schools better than the people who run and use them.

The centralisation of educational governance in Pakistan has historically produced systems that are administratively heavy but institutionally distant. Decision-making becomes slower, less responsive and disconnected from local realities. Communities become passive recipients rather than active stakeholders. Head-teachers become implementers of orders rather than leaders of institutions.

The ending of SMC’s financial autonomy is not simply an education policy decision. It is part of a governance philosophy that remains reluctant to devolve meaningful power to local communities.

The education system in the Punjab does not merely need more funds or new reforms. It also needs a deeper democratic shift in how authority is understood. Until schools are trusted as institutions capable of governing themselves with accountability, community participation will remain ceremonial and decentralisation will continue to exist more in policy language than in practice.

The writer is a youth and social development consultant. He can be reached at [email protected].