Part I — Situation overview

At its session of 29 July 2026 the Government decided on the restructuring of the governance system of public education; the decision was announced by the prime minister on 30 July. The announcement consists of three elements: the intermediate governing function of the Klebelsberg Centre is abolished, and the institution is transformed into a background institution for research and for supporting education; the governance of education passes directly to the Ministry of Education and Children’s Affairs from 1 January 2027; and on 20 August all school district director positions will be advertised in open competition, with a five-year mandate and with the involvement of mayors. In a post published the same day, Judit Lannert, Minister of Education and Children’s Affairs, traced the reason for the decision back to the report of the ministry’s two-month review: according to this, “that excessively centralised mode of operation has been rebuilt” which was already shown in 2016 not to work, and the final conclusion of the process is that “the era of centralisation is coming to a close”.

The published elements of the review describe a financial-management stalemate. According to the prime minister’s announcement, in several cases the school districts had to dip into the allowance intended for wages and personnel benefits in order to finance the daily operation of the schools; in 2025 27 billion forints of supplementary support was needed purely to pay the utility bills; the school district could not decide independently even about a procurement of barely one million forints, while about reallocations of several billion forints the budgetary supervisor was informed only after the fact — and the allocation criteria of one three-billion reallocation could not be named even afterwards. This duality — tight control at the micro level, opaque room for manoeuvre at the macro level — is the characteristic pattern of Hungarian intermediate governance today, and it is familiar outside public education as well: on the same day the directors-general of the research centres attached to Eötvös Loránd University demanded the payment of their resources withheld for political reasons, which is the higher-education variant of the same pattern.

MIAK’s reading can be summarised briefly. The diagnosis is accurate: the governance of public education over the past decade was over-regulated at the micro level and weakly accountable at the macro level, and this must be changed. The proposed structure, however, does not in itself solve the problem: eliminating the middle tier and introducing direct ministerial governance is a shortening of the chain of command, not the placement of decision-making powers further down — that is, between the rhetoric of the announcement (decentralisation) and the announced structure (a shorter, more direct central chain) there is today no connection. The simultaneously announced competition for all leadership posts sharpens this tension: it offers a chance for merit-based selection, but at the same time it replaces the leadership of an entire governing layer at a single point in time, and moreover at the same time as the 2027 entry into force.

Part II — Literature foundation

The question — when does relocating the decision-making level improve matters and when does it make them worse — is one of the best-explored areas of education research. Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director for education and head of the PISA assessments, records in his volume World Class, relying on the PISA data, that the effect of school independence does not operate on its own: where there is professional knowledge and an assessment culture shared among teachers, autonomy improves results; where there is not, it may also worsen them — and well-functioning systems have, precisely for this reason, moved away from “administrative accountability” towards “professional accountability”. The World Bank’s World Development Report 2018 describes the same problem at the system level: the characteristic failure of education systems is not a single bad decision but “misalignment”, in which the actors answer to one another rather than to learning outcomes, and thus a low-accountability, low-learning equilibrium develops. And Alexis de Tocqueville (French political thinker, a classic of modern democratic analysis) gives in his work Democracy in America the conceptual key to the present dispute: he distinguishes governmental from administrative centralisation, and warns that the union of the two produces the strongest central power — in plain terms: removing a middle tier does not weaken the centre merely because there are fewer actors in the chain. The detailed treatment of the literature — author by author, with quotations — can be found in the 6.4 Literature in detail section.

Part III — MIAK’s concrete proposal

MIAK proposes three measurable measures which turn the restructuring from an organisational rearrangement into an actual placement of competences.

3.1 A public competence map before the entry into force on 1 January 2027 (by 31 December 2026)

MIAK proposes that before entry into force a public, itemised competence map be published which records line by line: who decides today on the given question, who will decide in the 2027 structure, and up to what value threshold. The map should cover at least four families of competence: financial management (procurement value thresholds, powers of reallocation, the thresholds of approval by the maintaining body), personnel matters (creation of posts, recruitment and dismissal of teachers, appointment of institution heads), professional questions (allocation of teaching hours, division into groups, the local curriculum) and development (renovation, maintenance, equipment procurement). This is not an administrative formality: without it, it cannot be decided whether the reform is decentralisation. The KI3 bureaucracy-reduction programme point gives precisely this yardstick — measurability is part of the measure, not an after-the-fact report. Alongside the map, MIAK also proposes a single summary indicator: how many decision-making subject areas go to the institution, how many to the settlement as maintaining body or to the school district, and how many to the ministry. If this ratio shifts in favour of the ministry, then the announcement — measured against its own declared goal — has not been fulfilled, and this must be seen in good time, not years later.

3.2 A pre-published, scored set of application criteria for the school district leadership competitions (simultaneously with the notice of 20 August)

MIAK supports the simultaneous open advertisement of all school district leadership positions — the system of indefinite mandates without competition was indeed a hotbed of discretionary power. Open competition, however, is not in itself a guarantee but only a form: it fulfils its purpose if (1) the set of evaluation criteria and the scoring are public in advance, simultaneously with the notice, (2) the composition of the selection committee and any conflict-of-interest declarations are public, (3) the professional programme of the winning applications — with personal data redacted — can be examined afterwards, and (4) the weight of the opinion of the mayors involved is fixed in advance rather than case by case. This is the direct application of the KI7 official-selection programme point. MIAK also proposes one procedural safeguard: since an entire governing layer may be replaced at a single point in time in the middle of the 2027 system change, the notice should contain a handover obligation and a documented handover schedule for investments in progress — the loss of institutional memory is one of the most underestimated risks of any complete change of leadership, regardless of which government carries it out.

3.3 A school-level procurement and maintenance allowance, and mandatory cover for operating costs (from the 2027 budget year)

The third proposal concerns the financial-management side. MIAK proposes that every institution should receive its own small-value, earmarked procurement and maintenance allowance, on which the head of the institution decides after seeking the opinion of the teaching staff, with accounting after the fact — this is the level at which the present system most conspicuously fails, when even a procurement of one million forints requires approval by the maintaining body. In parallel with this, MIAK proposes separated cover for operating expenditure: the allowance allocated to utility and operating costs should not be interchangeable with the allowance for personnel benefits, in either direction. The 27 billion forints of after-the-fact supplement in 2025 and the tapping of the wage allowance are two sides of the same planning error — the solution is not stricter after-the-fact control but realistic planning and the separation of allowances. And the public availability of institutional performance and financial-management data is the basic condition of the O3 data-driven education development programme point: targeted intervention does not exist without institution-level data (see 6.4.2).

The three proposals are bound together by a single principle: the location of competence is the content of the reform, the organisational chart is only its form. Abolishing a middle tier may be decentralisation and may equally be an amplification of centralisation — the difference depends solely on whether the freed-up decisions migrate downwards or upwards, and on whether this is documented in advance and publicly. MIAK therefore does not dispute the direction of the announcement, but asks that the yardstick be put on the table before entry into force.

Part IV — Expected effects and risks

Dimension Expected effect Risk
Education The widening of institutional room for manoeuvre may bring faster, more realistic decisions in daily operation If only the chain is shortened but the powers do not move, the system will be more strongly centralised than it was
Public administration Merit-based, open leadership selection abolishes the discretionary system of indefinite mandates A leadership layer replaced at a single point in time brings a loss of institutional memory, precisely in the middle of the 2027 transition
Budget Separated cover for operating costs makes institutional financial management more predictable Rigid separation of allowances may be inflexible in the case of unexpected expenditure if it is not accompanied by an expedited reallocation procedure
Territorial inequality The involvement of mayors brings the decision closer to local reality The widening of local room for manoeuvre may strengthen differences between settlements if there is no equalising financing behind it

The main deliberative question stretches between independence and equality. Widening the room for manoeuvre of schools and maintaining bodies improves the system on average, but not evenly: institutions in a better position, with a stronger professional and municipal background, make use of it faster, whereas in lagging regions independence does not in itself produce capacity. MIAK’s position is therefore that the placement of competences must be accompanied by equalising financing and professional support services — precisely the role for which the Klebelsberg Centre, transformed into a background institution, may be suited, if its task is genuinely professional service provision and not the recovery of governance under another name. The second sensitive point is timing: the simultaneity of the competition for all leadership posts and the structural transition compounds the risk, and MIAK therefore regards the handover obligation and the documented transfer of matters in progress not as a formality but as the most important safeguard of the transition.

A procedural remark on implementation: the level of legal source of the announced restructuring is not public today. The legal status of the school district centres and the placement of the rights of the maintaining body are regulated partly by statute and partly by government decree — in so far as the change also touches the statutory level, a decision of the National Assembly is required for implementation, and a government resolution is not in itself sufficient. MIAK asks that the legislative timetable be published together with the competence map, before entry into force — this is what makes it verifiable whether the restructuring can be implemented on time.

Part V — Measurability and summary

5.1 What is worth tracking? (proposed performance indicators)

According to MIAK the following performance indicators (KPIs, in English Key Performance Indicator) are worth tracking over 12–24 months:

  • Competence ratio: the distribution of decision-making subject areas broken down by institution / settlement as maintaining body / school district / ministry, comparing the 2026 and the 2027 state — proposed target a measurable increase in the share of the institutional and the local level.
  • Actual use of the institutional procurement allowance: how many institutions used their own allowance and in what proportion — proposed target that within a year more than 80 per cent of institutions make use of it, because low use signals that the power exists only on paper.
  • The transparency of the application procedure: the share of school district competitions advertised with a pre-published scored set of criteria, and the share of published winning professional programmes — proposed target 100 per cent for both.
  • The scale of after-the-fact supplementary support for operating expenditure: measured against the 2025 base of 27 billion forints — proposed target an improvement in planning accuracy, that is, a substantive decrease in additional demand during the year.
  • The number of unfilled teaching posts broken down by school district, published half-yearly — this shows whether the governance reform reaches down to the level of the classroom.

5.2 Summary

The key message: the direction of the announced restructuring is defensible, but its content cannot as yet be verified — and MIAK asks the decision-maker to publish, before the entry into force on 1 January 2027, the itemised competence map and the legislative timetable, and to advertise the school district competitions with a pre-published, scored set of criteria. And it asks the public to enquire not about the organisational chart but about the location of the decision-making powers: “who will decide from now on whether the school roof gets repaired?” — this is the one question that settles whether decentralisation has taken place.

Two MIAK foundational values are in play on this topic. Transparency, because the quality of a leadership-selection procedure depends not on the label “open competition” but on the criteria published in advance and on the public decision — without these, the competition remains the legitimising form of political replacement, regardless of who issues the notice. And data-drivenness, because the extent of decentralisation is a measurable quantity: the number of competences, the value thresholds, the share of institutional allowances used. Until these are published, the dispute about the reform will necessarily be about intentions rather than about the result — and this has been the most costly habit of Hungarian education policy over the past decade and a half.

Part VI — Justifications and further sources

6.1 The press framing by spectrum

The liberal-left and public-affairs band took over the governmental justification as its frame, but with differing emphases. 444.hu led on the fact of the demotion (“the Klebelsberg Centre is being demoted to a background institution”), and brought the harshest findings of the review into the report: the tapping of the wage allowance and the several thousand unfilled posts. 24.hu framed the same announcement from the direction of the change of leaders (“all school district leadership posts are being put out to competition”), and carried the financial-management anomalies in detail — the one-million-forint procurement limit, the inexplicable criteria of the three-billion reallocation. Telex placed the ministerial post at the centre, and thereby gave the strongest doctrinal frame: “the era of centralisation is coming to a close”. What was missing from all three treatments: how the announced structure — direct ministerial governance — relates to that sentence.

The pro-government and conservative band reported more briefly but factually: Mandiner carried the fact of the “complete restructuring”, without critical commentary and without detailing the financial-management findings. The day’s framing thus followed the announcer’s narrative one-sidedly — neither band asked about the structural contradiction (a shorter chain versus decentralisation).

On the same day HVG carried an article which places the topic in a wider frame, although it is not about public education: the directors-general of the research centres attached to Eötvös Loránd University are demanding the payment of their billions withheld for political reasons. This report gives the most important context of the present restructuring: in the Hungarian education and science institutional system, financing discretion — to whom, when and with what justification transfers are made — has for years been an instrument of governance in its own right. As long as this remains so, rearranging the levels of governance changes little in itself.

6.2 Facts and data

Data Value Source
The day of the government decision 29 July 2026 (Wednesday cabinet session) prime ministerial announcement, 30 July 2026
The start of direct ministerial governance 1 January 2027 prime ministerial announcement, 30 July 2026
The advertising of the school district leadership competitions 20 August 2026 prime ministerial announcement, 30 July 2026
The duration of the leadership mandate 5 years (instead of the previous indefinite mandate) prime ministerial announcement, 30 July 2026
Supplementary support to the school districts for utility expenditure 27 billion forints (2025) prime ministerial announcement, 30 July 2026
The upper limit of independent school district procurement powers there was no independent decision even below approx. 1 million forints prime ministerial announcement, 30 July 2026
Reallocation reported after the fact about reallocations of several billion forints the budgetary supervisor was informed only after the fact; the allocation criteria of one 3 billion item could not be named prime ministerial announcement, 30 July 2026
The duration of the review 2 months, report at the cabinet session of 29 July 2026 statement of the Minister of Education and Children’s Affairs, 30 July 2026
The new head of the Klebelsberg Centre Edit Sinka (appointment: third week of July 2026) statement of the Minister of Education and Children’s Affairs, 30 July 2026

The most important connection in the table is the juxtaposition of the two financial-management rows. The one-million-forint procurement limit and the multi-billion reallocation reported after the fact existed in the same system — that is, the problem was not the quantity of control but its location: it was tight where local knowledge matters, and loose where the risk is large. A reform is successful if it reverses this relationship: greater freedom in the daily operation of the institution, prior, documented justification for large-value reallocations.

6.3 Policy dimensions

  • Education (programme points) — the public availability of institutional and school district performance data is the basic condition of data-driven education development (programme point ID: O3); the professional evaluation criteria of leadership selection carry the logic of performance-based teacher motivation (programme point ID: O8) over to the level of the maintaining body.
  • Public administration and e-government (programme points) — open, scored leadership selection is the subject of the official-selection and rotation system (programme point ID: KI7); the competence map and the review of value thresholds fit into the methodology of measurable bureaucracy reduction (programme point ID: KI3); the after-the-fact evaluation of the restructuring is an application case of Drucker-principled efficiency measurement (programme point ID: KI8).
  • Territorial inequality and rural policy (programme points) — the territorial effect of the school district rearrangement and of mayoral involvement must be measured on the yardstick of the rural public-service minimum (programme point ID: TE4); for tracking the effects broken down territorially, the micro-regional development index (programme point ID: TE1) gives the frame.

6.4 Literature in detail

6.4.1 Andreas Schleicher: World Class — How to Build a 21st-Century School System

The volume by Andreas Schleicher (the OECD’s director for education, the initiator of the PISA assessments) draws from the international comparative data one claim that is decisive from the point of view of the present Hungarian decision: the effect of school independence is conditional. On the basis of the PISA data — he writes — in those systems where knowledge is shared among teachers, autonomy is an advantage; where, however, the culture of professional learning and accountability is absent, independence may also worsen pupil performance. The author formulates this conditionality at the level of teacher autonomy too:

“These differences in the extent of autonomy granted to teachers suggest that the effect of autonomy depends on context. In countries where teacher education and selection produce a well-prepared and independent teaching profession, autonomy gives scope for creativity and innovation; in other cases autonomy may simply amplify poor judgement and faulty decisions.”

The book’s other directly applicable distinction runs between “administrative” and “professional” accountability: the former identifies good and bad schools with data and then intervenes; the latter builds on the internal norms of the profession and on collegial evaluation. From the point of view of the Hungarian restructuring this means that removing the middle tier creates neither the one nor the other in itself — the institutions of professional accountability (mentoring, collegial classroom visits, institutional self-evaluation, public outcome data) must be built separately, otherwise the placement of powers takes place in a vacuum. Schleicher’s Singaporean example shows the same: the school clusters were given greater independence, but simultaneously also a new form of accountability — the old inspection system was replaced by a model built on self-evaluation and external review every six years.

📖 Source: Andreas Schleicher: World Class — How to Build a 21st-Century School System

6.4.2 World Bank: World Development Report 2018 — Learning to Realize Education’s Promise

The World Bank’s report describes the failures of education systems not as individual errors but as system-level “misalignment”. According to the central proposition, the misalignments are not random: because of competing interests, a policy decision is rarely determined by whether it improves learning — far more frequently it is the actors stronger in the political arena who decide, and the actors answer to one another rather than to learning outcomes. The report names the end state of this mechanism as follows:

“As a result, many systems are stuck in a low-learning trap, characterized by low accountability and high inequality.”

Two conclusions follow for the Hungarian situation. The first: the school district financial-management anomalies presented — the tapping of the wage allowance to cover utilities, the billion-forint reallocations reported after the fact — are precisely the symptoms of the “low-accountability equilibrium”, that is, they are not individual abuses but the logical consequences of the system’s incentives; a change of personnel is therefore not sufficient in itself. The second: the report highlights the role of measurement and publication as the main instrument for moving out of the equilibrium, and also warns that governments often avoid precisely the publication of results. MIAK’s proposal concerning institutional performance and financial-management data is therefore not an additional administrative burden but a condition of the reform’s success: it is the data that ties the actors’ responsibility back to learning outcomes. The report also identifies the management capacity of school leadership as an independent factor robustly associated with pupil outcomes — this is the empirical basis of the professional criteria of the present leadership-selection procedure.

📖 Source: World Bank: World Development Report 2018 — Learning to Realize Education’s Promise

6.4.3 Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America

In his work written in the first half of the nineteenth century, Tocqueville gives the most precise conceptual distinction of the present dispute. He separates governmental centralisation — holding in one hand matters extending to the whole nation (legislation, foreign affairs) — from administrative centralisation, that is, the gathering into one place of the direction of local, partial matters. His warning concerns the union of the two:

“It is evident that a central power acquires immense influence when it is united to administrative centralization.”

Translated to the Hungarian public-education restructuring: eliminating the Klebelsberg Centre as a middle tier does not touch governmental centralisation, but it distinctly strengthens administrative centralisation — if the competences pass to the ministry — and does so along a chain shorter, and therefore faster, than before. Tocqueville’s argument is nevertheless not an objection in principle to central power: he claims that self-government exercised in local matters is the training ground that ties citizens to public affairs. This also gives the deeper justification of MIAK’s proposal: school-level decision-making power is not merely a question of efficiency but the condition of the teaching staff, the parents and the settlement as maintaining body genuinely being able to feel responsible for their institution. A school that cannot even decide about the repair of its own roof will hardly be responsible for its own results either — and shortening the chain of command does not in itself help with this.

📖 Source: Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America

6.5 International comparison

European practice shows that in public-education governance what decides is not the number of levels but the placement of competences and the form of accountability. In the Finnish and Estonian systems the decisive part of the rights of the maintaining body lies with the settlement, and the central level supervises the curricular frame, the quality of teacher education and the assessment system — in return, teacher education is selective and professional accountability builds on internal norms. In the Dutch model schools manage their affairs with a high degree of institutional independence, but mandatory external inspection evaluation and a public institutional report counterbalance this. The English academy model — an example that also appears in Schleicher’s analysis — gives the greatest institutional independence, while that independence goes together with public performance-data publication and external inspection; and it is precisely this model that also shows the risk: where professional knowledge-sharing between schools is absent, greater freedom may increase differences. The Hungarian lesson is twofold. On the one hand, rearranging the decision-making levels has nowhere produced an improvement in outcomes on its own — everywhere it was the professional support and assessment system attached to it that made it effective. On the other hand, the peculiarity of the Hungarian situation is the simultaneity: few systems have replaced the entire middle-management layer at once while also rearranging the structure at the same time, and the risk management of the transition — handover, documentation of matters in progress — therefore carries greater weight here than in the examples cited.

Education

  • O3 — Data-driven education development
  • O8 — Performance-based teacher motivation
  • O9 — Practising democratic participation in school

Public administration and e-government

  • KI3 — Measurable bureaucracy reduction
  • KI7 — Official-selection and rotation system
  • KI8 — Drucker-principled efficiency measurement in public administration

Territorial inequality and rural policy

  • TE1 — Micro-regional development index
  • TE4 — Rural public-service minimum

Proposed new programme point: A competence map for every governance restructuring — before the entry into force of any public-education, healthcare or public-administration organisational restructuring, a mandatory, public, itemised list of competences in the structure “who decides today / who decides from now on / up to what value threshold” — for the Public administration and e-government and Education areas.

6.7 List of sources

Press sources (MIAK press monitor, 31 July 2026 — topic 3):

Knowledge-base references (books):

  • 📖 Andreas Schleicher: World Class — How to Build a 21st-Century School System
  • 📖 World Bank: World Development Report 2018 — Learning to Realize Education’s Promise
  • 📖 Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America

Note: the local file path of the book does NOT appear in the visible text of the blog — only the author and the title.

MIAK internal materials:

  • MIAK policy area: Education (programme points; programme point ID: O3)
  • MIAK policy area: Public administration and e-government (programme points; programme point ID: KI7)
  • MIAK policy area: Territorial inequality and rural policy (programme points; programme point ID: TE4)
  • MIAK press monitor, 31 July 2026 — topic 3, score: 84/100

Additional public data sources:

  • KIR-STAT institutional and statistical database
  • The OECD Education at a Glance data series on decision-making levels
  • National assessment of basic competences of the Education Office
  • European Commission Education and Training Monitor

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