Piloting Education Decentralisation in Armenia: Mapping the Way Forward
For decades, Armenian schools have operated under a system in which decisions about funding, staffing, and curriculum have flowed almost exclusively from the centre — but this is now beginning to change.
School in rural settlement in Armenia
In the spring of 2026, under the Support to Decentralisation and Local Self-Government Reforms in Armenia (DeaLoG) project implemented by SALAR International and funded by Sida, Armenia launched a structured pilot initiative to explore how education governance responsibilities can be transferred to local municipalities — testing how municipalities can work together with newly built school hubs in Armenia to improve education outcomes, improve accountability mechanisms, and take a role of a local education authority. A School hub is an educational institution which is established to deliver general education services of all types and levels, including pre-school and extracurricular education. Based on local needs, it may also provide nonformal education for adults and implement cultural, technological training and sports activities for youth. As such and in addition to its core mission of education delivery, the school hub shall also act as a community development centre.
Context of Education Decentralisation in Armenia
Armenia's broader decentralisation reform has been years in the making. Following constitutional amendments in 2015 and the adoption of the new Law on Local Self-Government in 2016, the country embarked on a major administrative-territorial reorganisation, consolidating hundreds of small communities into larger, more capable municipalities. Yet even as this structural reform progressed, the governance of key public services — education chief among them — remained centralised, with limited responsibilities assigned to municipalities.
It is within this context that the DeaLoG project has been supporting Armenia's reform agenda since 2022. One of the identified priorities from early in the project was education decentralisation — specifically, exploring whether and how certain school management responsibilities could be transferred to local governments.
The proposed education decentralisation pilot runs from February 2026 to December 2028. It is a joint initiative led by the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport (MOESCS) and carried out with the support of the Ministry of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure. Three municipalities have been selected to participate, each representing a different marz (region) of Armenia - a deliberate effort to test the model across varied geographic and socioeconomic contexts.
This is the first pilot of its kind in decades — a significant milestone in Armenia's broader decentralisation journey.
From Network to Pilot: The School-Municipality Nexus
The pilot did not emerge from scratch. Prior to its launch, DeaLoG project developed and rolled out the School-Municipality Nexus initiative across eight marzes of Armenia — an independent strand of work that brought municipalities and schools together to explore new forms of collaboration for the benefit of students and community development. Using a structured Maturity Model methodology, participating municipalities went through self-assessment, gap identification, action planning and capacity building across a broad range of cooperation domains, including school governance, infrastructure management, civic education, inclusion and wellbeing. The experience gained through this nationwide network directly informed the design of the pilot — and helped identify which education responsibilities could realistically and desirably be delegated to local communities.
How the Pilot Works
The pilot is structured around four interconnected components. On the governance and legal side, it focuses on updating municipal frameworks and establishing clear coordination mechanisms across the municipality–marz–central government chain. On the capacity and management side, it strengthens municipal ability to manage school buildings, infrastructure and education functions, including dedicated training for municipal staff.
In terms of service delivery, the pilot tests how municipalities can effectively coordinate pre-school and extracurricular education services and effectively, transform the school hubs into community development centres, a vision clearly put forward by the Government of Armenia. Finally, a strong monitoring and accountability strand runs throughout — using self-assessment tools, performance indicators and regular reporting to track progress and generate evidence.
Across all four components, SALAR's "Governing Together" (STYRSAM) methodology provides the structured framework for collaborative, accountable governance at every level.
Beyond its immediate activities, the pilot serves a broader strategic purpose — to help Armenia map out the boundaries and pathways of a future education decentralisation policy. By testing what works in practice, it will generate the evidence and experience needed to answer the important questions: which responsibilities can (realistically) be transferred to local governments, how should that transfer be structured, and under what conditions can it be sustained.
Ultimately, the pilot is about more than three municipalities — it is about building a model that can reshape how education is governed across Armenia, bringing decisions closer to the communities they affect.