Community participation in the governance of school systems is a recurrent theme of educational reform in developed and developing countries alike. This article analyses the effort of one developing country -Nepal -to promote broader participation in educational decision-making through local school governance structure. It looks at how the current policy creates spaces for community participation in school and the extent to which a gap exists between policy intention and policy implementation. Drawing on the case study data, this article suggests that while the policy has created legitimate spaces for community participation in school, participation in such spaces is taking a form of tokenism, and the community represented in school governance is restricted to a small number of political elites. Given that ethnic, cultural, linguistic and socioeconomic characteristics of the local populace, problems exist within the school system to embrace differences and diversities that prevent a majority of parents from effective participation in school. This article concludes that along with the structural reform, participation can be reinforced by developing a long-term strategy to build community capacity for the provision and management of education, as well as by preparing educators to work effectively with parents of different socio-cultural backgrounds.

While school decentralisation policy in Nepal has been taking effect for more than 8 years with the financial and technical assistance of the World Bank, confusion and controversy have been prevalent in relation to its goals, outcomes and sustainability. This article explores the issues of school decentralisation in Nepal by relating the Bank's broader advocacy of decentralisation to the perceived reality at the national and local level. It does so by first summarising the Bank's approach to decentralisation and then looking at the local issues against the macro-level advocacy of education decentralisation. It reveals that there are significant variances between the Bank's vision on school decentralisation and the realities which confront its implementation at the local level. The article concludes that accommodating the interest of diverse stakeholders, change in traditional bureaucratic culture in government offices and contextualising the global policy in a local context are major issues for addressing the existing discrepancies between the macro-level advocacy and micro-level reality.

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This article explores the issues and concerns of Nepalese teachers in relation to Gaynor's (1998) three models of teacher management (administrative, grassroots and alternative), constructed in the context of decentralisation reform around the world. The article suggests that the existing teacher management policies in Nepal are problematic and controversial, embracing both the administrative and grassroots models of teacher management and maintaining both the centralised and decentralised policies of teacher selection, promotion and financing. With problems similar to those of many developing nations in Africa, decentralisation of teacher management results in growing division and hierarchy among teaching staff, and favouritism, cronyism and corruption at the local level. The lack of equitable distribution of qualified teachers across regions and schools is another concern. The article concludes that the decentralisation of teacher management is problematic particularly in the countries where a dual approach to teacher management has been adopted and where the political, economic, institutional, technical and educational systems need to respond to the specific characteristics and needs of schools and communities as a whole.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has affected all sphere of human life and the schools across the country are closed due to the risk of spreading the virus, online teaching has become a major alternative pedagogical strategy among the private schools in particular. This article reports a study that explores how private school teachers perceive and adopt technological learning, how they transfer their technological knowledge and skills into the online classroom and how they self-assess their practices. This is done through a phenomenological study focusing on the meaning the participants make from their lived experience on ‘technological learning and application’ in the face of the pandemic. The study found that dealing with uncertainty and fear of the COVID-19 and the additional pressure for doing online teaching amidst the crisis evoked frustration and anguish among the teachers. Despite a number of challenges and crisis, teachers, however, learn to deal with the technological challenges and manage to run the class through virtual mode. Nevertheless, they assess the online delivery is not effective due to the various constraints. The study suggests for ensuring the access of ICT resources and facilities to both teachers and students, sufficient training to the both groups and digitalize curricular materials for the effective implementation of virtual learning.