Part I — Situation overview

Ágnes Forsthoffer, Speaker of the National Assembly, and Judit Lannert, Minister for Education and Children’s Affairs, announced in a joint social-media post on 11 September 2026 that the ministry is opening an open competition for the head posts of all 60 school-district centres, and is accepting applications until 20 September. Announcing the competition is an executive competence — that of the education ministry and of the maintainer — and the Speaker of the National Assembly took part in the announcement not as a holder of competence but as an actor lending the announcement political weight. According to the reasoning given, what is needed are leaders who know the local reality — the schools, the teachers, the communities — and who will be partners in the transformation of the system. The school-district centre is the middle-tier maintainer-administrative unit of public education: it exercises the competences attached to running state schools, allocating resources and taking personnel decisions. The simultaneous replacement of sixty such heads is the largest personnel rearrangement carried out in a single step in the administration of public education since the regime change.

The measure has an August antecedent which has received little attention in the present debate, even though it substantively changes the stakes of the question. It emerged from the 17 August 2026 issue of Magyar Közlöny that the conditions for appointing a school-district director have been reduced. Under the earlier rule, a school-district director could be a person holding higher-education qualifications and professional qualifications, at least five years of managerial experience, and a teacher’s professional examination, a public-administration professional examination, specialised qualifications in public administration or government studies, or a bar examination. From the new requirement the higher-education qualification and the professional qualification remain, the requirement of managerial experience has fallen from five years to two, and the provisions on professional examinations have been deleted. At the same time the amendment has two elements pointing the other way: the appointment is for a fixed term of at most five years, and holding a competition has become mandatory. As part of the broader transformation plan, the middle-management function of the Klebelsberg Centre ceases and it continues as a background institution for education research and education support, employer’s rights return to the institution heads, and teaching staffs regain the opportunity to give an opinion on head-teacher applications. Two recent matters sharpen the background: the weak reading-literacy assessment results published in recent days, and an opposition petition for the minister’s dismissal launched because of her earlier statements about teachers.

MIAK’s reading: open competition and a fixed-term mandate are in themselves the right direction — one of the gravest structural problems of the earlier system was precisely the absence of competitions and the opacity of appointments. The simultaneous lowering of requirements, however, has the opposite effect, and is hard to reconcile with the phrase “professional competition”. Two years of managerial experience and a higher-education qualification without a professional examination form an entry threshold that makes most applicants technically eligible, and thereby places the entire weight of actual filtering on the adjudication — on the very step whose criteria are today not public. The question is therefore not whether the change is justified. The question is whether the yardsticks of selection are public, professional and verifiable after the event; without this the same loyalty-based appointment logic can be rebuilt, merely with the sign reversed.

Part II — Foundations in the literature

Three sources provide the frame in which the filling of the sixty leadership posts can be interpreted. Andreas Schleicher is Director for Education at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and he created PISA, the international programme for assessing student performance. In his volume World Class (2018) he argues that the centre of gravity of public-education governance has shifted: instead of the earlier school administration, the professional leadership of teaching has become the yardstick, and quality control is replaced by quality assurance. The New Zealand education researcher John Hattie, in his work Visible Learning (2008), shows from a synthesis of more than 800 meta-analyses that the effect of leadership work depends strongly on the type of leadership involved: the instructional leadership of teaching achieves a multiple of the effect size of general, motivating-transformational leadership. Kautilya, author of the ancient Indian Arthashastra, sets out the principle on which MIAK’s KI7 programme point is also built: the appointment of an official must be preceded by a documented, prior examination, and must be followed after appointment by regular checking. The detailed treatment of the literature — by author, with quotations — is in section 6.4 Literature in detail.

Part III — MIAK’s concrete proposal

MIAK proposes three measurable measures. None of them seeks to postpone the application deadline.

3.1 A scored evaluation framework published in advance (by the expiry of the application deadline)

MIAK proposes that the ministry publish, before the 20 September submission deadline, the criteria by which and the weights with which it will evaluate the applications. The framework should cover the measurable elements of the professional record, the leadership programme submitted, elements demonstrating knowledge of the school district’s situation, and the conflict-of-interest examination. This is particularly important now that the formal entry threshold has been lowered: if the statutory requirement is two years of managerial experience, then actual filtering takes place in the adjudication, and the criteria of adjudication are today unknown. Hattie’s finding (see 6.4.2) gives concrete substantive guidance here: the greatest measured effect comes from organising teachers’ professional development and from direct participation in the planning and evaluation of teaching, so these competences should carry the greatest weight, not organisational-administrative experience. Publishing the scored framework also means equal chances for applicants, and it is the formal frame of the documented pre-appointment examination under the KI7 programme point.

3.2 A public, comparable school-district performance indicator system (by the first half of 2027)

Sixty heads can be selected, but they can only be evaluated if there is something against which to measure their work. MIAK proposes that by the end of the first half of 2027 a public indicator system broken down by school district be established, publishing at least four data points in comparable form: value added based on the competence assessment (that is, pupil progress cleansed of the effect of social background), the rate of early school leaving, teacher turnover, and the share of unfilled teaching posts. This is the direct application of the O3 data-driven education development programme point to middle-tier administration, and combined with the data of the TE1 micro-regional development index it makes visible which school districts perform better or worse relative to their territorial circumstances. The indicators should nevertheless be published at school-district, not school, level. Ranking institutions would hit disadvantaged pupils hardest, and for the policy purpose a school-district breakdown is sufficient.

3.3 Mandate extension tied to performance (from the midpoint of the first five-year cycle)

The most important element of the legislative amendment is that the appointment is for a fixed term of at most five years. MIAK proposes that this be accompanied by a rule fixed in advance: extension of the mandate is tied to the trajectory of the indicators described in point 3.2, and the reasoning for the decision is public. The mid-term evaluation, due in the third year, should be developmental rather than sanctioning in purpose — the aim is not to replace leaders but to let the school district know what the maintainer expects of it, and to let the head receive support in time where the indicators are deteriorating. This is the extension of the logic of the O8 performance-based teacher motivation programme point to the governance level, and it is the structural element without which the present change could be repeated in five years without anyone being able to say what the previous one achieved.

The three proposals are bound together by the same principle: an open competition is a procedural form, not a result. The result is decided by whether we know in advance what we are looking for, whether we can measure afterwards that we found it, and whether anything follows from the measurement. The first and third elements are missing from the present package, and the second is today not available at school-district level — which is why filling the sixty posts in its current form necessarily becomes a question of trust rather than of professional merit.

Part IV — Expected effects and risks

Dimension Expected effect Risk
Education Selecting leaders with local knowledge and a pedagogical profile may improve the professional relationship between the school district and the schools over the medium term; the indicator system makes catch-up resources targeted Replacing sixty heads simultaneously during a school year entails a loss of institutional knowledge: handing over ongoing matters, contractual obligations and the local network of contacts takes several months
Public administration Mandatory competitions and fixed-term mandates create a predictable, repeatable procedure in place of the earlier discretionary appointment practice Lowering the entry requirements means a weakening of the formal filter; if the adjudication criteria are not public, judging the selection remains a question of trust
Territorial inequality Publishing data broken down by school district makes visible in which regions educational disadvantages accumulate, and provides a basis for targeted intervention It is harder to find good leaders for the school districts of disadvantaged regions; if mandate extension is tied to raw indicators, that punishes the school districts in the most difficult situations

The package’s main tension runs between speed and soundness. The nine-day application deadline is extremely short for a procedure covering sixty posts and requiring a professional programme as well — in practice this favours applicants who already knew about the announcement. The proposal tips towards the risk side if the evaluation framework appears after the submission deadline, or not at all: in that case the form of an open competition is achieved but not its substance. The second question for deliberation is the use of the indicators. Value-added measurement matters precisely because raw result data measure the social composition of the school district, not its work — the mandate-extension rule must therefore be built exclusively on indicators cleansed of the background effect, otherwise nobody will apply in the most difficult regions.

Part V — Measurability and summary

5.1 What is worth following? (suggested KPIs)

MIAK proposes four performance indicators (KPIs, in English: Key Performance Indicator) from which it will be visible in 6, 12 and 36 months whether a structural change has taken place, or merely a change of leaders:

  • The publicity of the evaluation framework: the suggested target is that the scored framework be available before the application submission deadline, and that at the announcement of results the reasoning for the adjudication be public for each school district.
  • The availability of the school-district performance indicator system: the suggested target is that by the end of the first half of 2027 the four basic indicators be available for all 60 school districts, in machine-readable form.
  • The rate of early school leaving broken down by school district: the national target of the O3 programme point is a reduction from 12.4 per cent to below 8 per cent; it is worth following whether the dispersion between school districts narrows, not only the average.
  • Teacher turnover and the share of unfilled posts: this is the indicator that signals most quickly when the professional environment in a school district is deteriorating — it is worth following with quarterly updates.

5.2 Summary

MIAK’s request in a single sentence: before the sixty posts are filled, say what you are looking for, and afterwards say against what it will be measured. Concretely: a scored evaluation framework before the 20 September deadline, a public school-district indicator system by the end of the first half of 2027, and a rule fixed in advance, tied to performance, for extending the mandates. None of these slows the ministry down in choosing whom it wishes — only in making its choice unassessable after the event.

Two MIAK foundational values are at stake here. One is transparency: introducing mandatory competitions is a serious step forward compared with earlier practice, but a competition is open if its yardstick is also public — without that the form is there and the guarantee is not. The other is data-drivenness: MIAK insists on the school-district indicator system because in the present debate nobody — neither the government nor its critics — can give a figure for how each of the sixty school districts performs. As long as this remains so, every change of leadership remains merely a question of trust.

Part VI — Reasoning and further sources

6.1 Press framing by spectrum

The liberal-left and general-interest band carried the news in a factual frame, but with significant differences in the depth of the framing. Telex was the only outlet to place the August legislative amendment alongside the announcement and to quote the old and the new requirement text item by item — that is, it made the accompanying legal conditions, not the rhetoric of the announcement, the backbone of the article. HVG followed the same thread and highlighted two further elements not featured elsewhere: that the appointment is for a fixed term of at most five years, and that holding a competition has become mandatory. 24.hu’s framing, by contrast, followed the government message of the announcement: the article’s headline features “regime change”, and the text repeats the elements of the July transformation plan — the employer’s rights returning to institution heads and the restoration of the teaching staff’s right to give an opinion. The lowering of requirements does not appear in that article. This difference is instructive in itself: from the same announcement one paper read a policy procedure and the other a political turning point.

The conservative band approached the topic not from the school-district competition but from the person of the minister. Mandiner reported that the KDNP had launched a petition for the minister’s dismissal, and that group leader Bence Rétvári called her earlier statements about teachers unacceptable — among them “I would replace every head teacher”, and the sentence that questioned the independent thinking of those choosing the teaching profession. The same paper also published the position of Erzsébet Nagy, president of the Democratic Trade Union of Teachers (PDSZ), who disagrees with the minister on several points but indicated that the earlier statements are not in themselves sufficient for judging her present position. Erzsébet Nagy is most concrete on the question of small schools: in her view a decision to close an institution cannot be taken purely on the basis of pupil numbers, because in small settlements the school is often one of the most important institutions of the local community, and before a decision it must also be examined whether the children’s travel to a school in another settlement can be ensured. By MIAK’s yardstick this is a substantive consideration: the question touches on the TE4 rural public-service minimum, and it requires an impact assessment settlement by settlement, not a debate of principle. The conservative band did not, however, carry the procedural question of the school-district competition — there too the lowering of requirements did not become the focus of criticism, even though it is the strongest verifiable fact in the news.

6.2 Facts and data

Datum Value Source
Day the competition was announced 11 September 2026 Telex / HVG / 24.hu, 11 September 2026
Number of school-district centres affected 60 (all) Telex / HVG / 24.hu, 11 September 2026
Application submission deadline 20 September 2026 Telex / HVG, 11 September 2026
Earlier appointment requirement higher-education qualification and professional qualification, at least 5 years of managerial experience, plus a teacher’s, public-administration or bar professional examination (or specialised qualifications in public administration / government studies) Magyar Közlöny, 17 August 2026 (as reported by Telex / HVG)
New appointment requirement higher-education qualification and professional qualification, at least 2 years of managerial experience; the professional-examination provisions deleted Magyar Közlöny, 17 August 2026 (as reported by Telex / HVG)
Length of the appointment fixed term of at most 5 years; holding a competition is mandatory HVG, 11 September 2026
Future role of the Klebelsberg Centre the middle-management function ceases; it continues as a background institution for education research and education support Telex / 24.hu, 11 September 2026
Employer’s rights return to institution heads; the teaching staff’s right to give an opinion on head-teacher applications is restored 24.hu, 11 September 2026

One data point requires a separate note. The exact text of the legislative amendment is relayed by the articles; itemised verification of the original gazette issue in the National Legislation Register is recommended — the comparison of the old and the new requirement text appears as a verbatim quotation in the Telex and HVG articles, and the two papers’ reports agree.

6.3 Policy dimensions

  • Education (programme points) — measurement and leadership incentives: O3 (data-driven education development) provides the frame of the school-district indicator system, and O8 (performance-based teacher motivation) the principle that the proposal extends to the governance level;
  • Public administration and e-government (programme points) — the procedural core of selection: KI7 (official-selection and rotation system) sets out the requirement of a documented pre-appointment examination, and KI6 (competitive public-service pay system) the condition without which there will be no applicants for school districts in difficult situations;
  • Territorial inequality and rural policy (programme points) — the connection between school-district performance and territorial circumstances: TE1 (micro-regional development index) and TE4 (rural public-service minimum) provide the two data systems with which the school-district indicators can be combined.

6.4 Literature in detail

6.4.1 Andreas Schleicher: World Class

One of the central claims of Schleicher’s volume is that the understanding of the role of public-education governance is outdated: systems were built on the logic of the industrial age, where the curriculum was designed at the top of the pyramid and then reached the classroom through several layers of government. According to the author this structure is today too slow, and leaves the most important resource unused:

“Even the best education minister cannot meet the needs of millions of students, hundreds of thousands of teachers and tens of thousands of schools. The task is to build on the expertise of our teachers and school leaders and to involve them.”

In the same place he formulates the shift of emphasis that matters most for the present topic: “in the past administration emphasised school administration; now the emphasis has to be on the instructional leadership of teaching, where school leaders support, evaluate and develop quality teachers” — and he adds that “the past was about quality control; the future is about quality assurance”.

In the Hungarian situation this means two things. On the one hand, abolishing the middle-management function of the Klebelsberg Centre and returning employer’s rights to institution heads point precisely in the direction Schleicher describes. On the other hand, however, this upgrades rather than downgrades the role of the school-district head: if the middle tier does not instruct but supports, then the head needs pedagogical professional competence — that is, precisely the ability that the now-reduced entry requirements no longer filter for.

📖 Source: Andreas Schleicher: World Class

6.4.2 John Hattie: Visible Learning

In his chapter on the effect of leadership Hattie asks not whether leadership matters but which kind of it matters. The effect size is the metric by which the results of different interventions can be compared; Hattie’s reference value is 0.40. According to the research he cites,

“the effect of instructional leadership on student outcomes (d = 0.55) was substantially greater than that of transformational leadership (d = 0.09)”.

The breakdown gives even more precise guidance. The elements of instructional leadership that achieved the greatest effect were those relating to promoting and participating in teachers’ learning and professional development (d = 0.91), and to planning, coordinating and evaluating teaching and the curriculum — that is, regular lesson observation and feedback given to teachers. The effect of school leadership was, moreover, substantially stronger in the lower grades than in upper primary and secondary school.

From the point of view of the Hungarian application procedure this is the most concrete substantive yardstick. If the evaluation of the competition announced for the sixty school-district head posts measures how many years the candidate spent in a managerial position, then it is scoring a criterion whose connection to student outcomes is weak. If, however, it measures how the candidate would organise teachers’ professional development, and in what system they would give feedback to school heads, then it is asking about the dimension with the demonstrably greatest effect.

📖 Source: John Hattie: Visible Learning

6.4.3 Kautilya: Arthashastra

The ancient Indian work of statecraft treats the question of administrative appointment in a surprisingly modern way. According to the treatment of the text, the ruler appointed his advisers and officials “after careful examination directed at their character, their background and their leadership abilities”, and after appointment he was also obliged to test their reliability regularly. The volume’s commentary ties this to present-day practice:

“Kautilya insisted on character references before anyone was hired. This practice, which he initiated, still holds good today.”

Kautilya also names two typical causes of abuse of office: one is arrogance based on learning, wealth or the support of high-ranking patrons, the other is material gain. The first category — “support received from a high place” — matters for the present topic because it names precisely the risk that arises at every change of political cycle: appointment on the basis of a supportive relationship rather than of performance.

For the sixty school-district posts this means the following. The KI7 programme point takes over the documented pre-appointment examination and regular subsequent checking not as an innovation but as one of the oldest principles of state administration. In the present procedure the element of subsequent checking has appeared — in the form of a fixed-term mandate — but that of prior, documented examination has not: the reduced entry threshold and the non-public adjudication criteria together weaken precisely the filter that Kautilya regarded two thousand four hundred years ago as a basic condition of the system of office.

📖 Source: Kautilya: Arthashastra

6.5 International comparison

The most direct parallel is the Dutch school inspectorate system, to which the O3 programme point also refers: there every school receives an annual data-based evaluation, and poorly performing institutions are accompanied by a targeted support programme. Two elements of the Dutch model are essential in the Hungarian situation. One is that the evaluation does not rank but sets a threshold: the question is whether an institution reaches the expected level, not what position it occupies. The other is that a weak result entails not a sanction but resources and professional help — this is what makes the system resistant to the concealment of measurement data.

For the selection of middle-tier governance the most instructive model is the English National Professional Qualification system, which prescribes standardised professional training and an examination tied to leadership posts. Its logic is precisely the opposite of the Hungarian August amendment: it solves the selection problem not by lowering the entry threshold but by making a uniform professional preparation tailored to the post compulsory. The lesson is not that this model can be adopted — the Hungarian system has no such qualification framework, and with a nine-day application deadline there would be nothing to tie it to — but that, simultaneously with deleting the professional-examination requirement, it would be worth fixing what professional preparation appointed heads receive in the first year of their mandate.

A further lesson of Schleicher’s analysis relates to Finnish practice, where the role of middle-tier administration is minimal and most of the professional support is provided by the schools’ own networks. This model cannot be copied in Hungarian conditions — the maintainer function of the school-district system is a statutory obligation — but it highlights that defining the task of the sixty heads is a prior question to that of their persons: if the middle-management role of the Klebelsberg Centre ceases, it must be clarified what remains within the school district’s competence, and the competition announcement ought to answer this.

Education

  • O3 — Data-driven education development
  • O8 — Performance-based teacher motivation

Public administration and e-government

  • KI6 — Competitive public-service pay system
  • KI7 — Official-selection and rotation system

Territorial inequality and rural policy

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

Proposed new programme point: School-district performance indicator system — for the Education policy area: a public, machine-readable, quarterly updated indicator system for all 60 school districts covering value added, early school leaving, teacher turnover and unfilled posts.

6.7 List of sources

Press sources (MIAK press monitor, 12 September 2026 — topic 4):

Knowledge-base references (books):

  • 📖 Andreas Schleicher: World Class
  • 📖 John Hattie: Visible Learning
  • 📖 Kautilya: Arthashastra

MIAK internal materials:

  • MIAK policy area: Education (programme points; programme point ID: O3, O8)
  • MIAK policy area: Public administration and e-government (programme points; programme point ID: KI6, KI7)
  • MIAK policy area: Territorial inequality and rural policy (programme points; programme point ID: TE1, TE4)
  • MIAK press monitor, 12 September 2026 — topic 4, score: 85/100

Supplementary public data sources:

  • National Competence Assessment database — the source of the value-added indicator
  • KIR-STAT — public-education institutional and personnel statistics
  • OECD Education at a Glance — international comparison of the role of governance levels
  • National Legislation Register — the government decree in force on the appointment of school-district directors

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