The Ministry of Education is the apex body responsible for initiating and managing education activities in the country. The Minister of Education (assisted by the State/Assistant Minister), provides political leadership to the Ministry. The Ministry, as a part of the government bureaucracy, is headed by the Secretary of Education and consists of the central office, various functional offices, and offices located at the regional and district levels. The Central Office or the Ministry is mainly responsible for policy development, planning and monitoring, and evaluation regarding different aspects of education.
The Ministry has established five Regional Directorates and 75 District Education Offices, in five development regions and 75 districts respectively. This was done with the intentions of bringing education administration nearer to the people. These decentralized offices are responsible for overseeing nonformal and school-level education activities in their respective areas. Regional Directorates are mainly responsible for coordinating and monitoring and evaluation of education activities and the District Education Offices are the main implementing agencies.
The National Center for Educational Development (NCED) is an apex body for teacher training in Nepal. There are 34 Educational Training Centers (ETCs) under NCED to support the teachers in pedagogical areas.
Legally, there are two types of school in the country: community and institutional. Community schools receive regular government grants whereas institutional schools are funded by the school's themselves or other non-governmental sources. Institutional schools are organised either as a non-profit trust or as a company. However, in practical terms, schools are mainly of two types: public (community) and private (institutional).
A third type of school is the kind run by the local people who are enthusiasticabout having a school in their locality. They do not receive regular government grants and most of them do not have any other sustainable financial source. Supported and managed by the local people, they can be thus identified as the real community schools.
Except one, all universities/academies are publicly managed and are supported by public source fund. However, public universities also provide affiliation to private colleges. Two academies of higher education are single college institutes whereas other universities have constituent and affiliated colleges across the country.*