Devolution of School Education: Provincial Responsibilities and Performance in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Post-18th Constitutional Amendment

The research paper examines the performance of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province in school education following the 18th Constitutional Amendment in Pakistan, which devolved the school education governance exclusively to provinces. Despite the amendment being aimed at enhancing provincial autonomy and advancement of education service delivery in the provinces, numerous issues remained hindering the provincial educational performance. The study adopted a mixed-method research approach involving a quantitative analysis of provincial education indicators and forty-four qualitative semi-structured interviews conducted with different categories of respondents. The findings reported that although the provincial empowerment and autonomy were guaranteed by the devolution, the KP province could not achieve the desired milestones in the devolved mandates due to its meager financial resources, weak institutional capacity and lack of a comprehensive, indigenously formulated education policy. This research article contributes to the literature on the subject of devolution and educational governance in a developing federation. It also delineates the significance of the context-specific capacity-based interventions for the efficient educational governance within the federal system of Pakistan.