About the School Choice National Conference
The School Choice National Conference (SCNC), launched in 2009, is the flagship education conference of the Centre for Civil Society (CCS). For over a decade, SCNC has provided India’s education ecosystem with a rare platform: one dedicated to system-level reforms in education governance, informed by a classical liberal perspective.
SCNC is a unique intellectual space where policymakers, regulators, academics, and practitioners engage in first- principles thinking about education policy. Unlike other education conferences in India that focus on pedagogy, curriculum, or technology, SCNC distinguishes itself by interrogating the architecture of governance, the design of regulatory frameworks, and the role of markets and choice in ensuring accountability and equity.
The Legacy of SCNC
Since its inception, SCNC has served as a pivotal launchpad for national education reform by introducing ideas like student-centric voucher funding and independent school regulation via the State School Standards Authority. It provided crucial critiques of the Right to Education Act and helped drive state-level public–private partnership pilots.
The conference has also been a learning space for reform champions, where bureaucrats, economists, school leaders, and civil society actors debated the mechanics of choice, competition, and accountability. Above all, it acts as a collaborative hub, bringing together policy leaders and civil society to spark lasting reform partnerships.
Focus of SCNC 2026- The Economics of Education
Over the last two decades, India's education budget has grown roughly 5.5 times. Learning outcomes have not kept pace. ASER's own reading-proficiency numbers have gone backward, from 53.1% in 2006 to 44.8% in 2024. That gap is the puzzle at the centre of SCNC 2026: not whether India spends enough on education, but why more spending hasn't brought better outcomes, and what would have to change, in how the system is financed and in what that financing actually pays for, to close it.
With 14.6 lakh schools serving 24.7 crore students, India runs the largest school system in the world, and one of the most heavily and centrally financed. The 13th School Choice National Conference 2026 turns to the architecture behind that spending, across three themes:
a. Public Financing and Fiscal Federalism
That growth in the topline number carries through at the state level too: public spending on school education in India runs at roughly 4% of GDP. NEP 2020 sets a 6% target for the sector, and it's tempting to read the shortfall as the reason for India's learning crisis. But that's not what the evidence above shows: India's education budget has grown 5.5 times over two decades while reading proficiency has fallen. The more consequential number in this story isn't the size of the allocation. It's how that money moves once it leaves the treasury, through which channels, under whose control, toward what, once it reaches a school.
Education sits on India's Concurrent List, so both the Centre and the States hold the power to legislate on it and, in principle, the responsibility to fund it. In practice, the split is uneven. School education alone accounts for 60% of the Education Ministry's budget (PRS, 2026), channelled largely through centrally sponsored schemes such as Samagra Shiksha and PM POSHAN. States are held accountable for outcomes on the ground, but often exercise only partial control over how that money moves, tied instead to centrally defined formulas, timelines, and conditions they did not set.
To answer that, this theme features original research across six states (Assam, Bihar, Delhi, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and Uttar Pradesh), examining how each allocates, structures, and utilises its education budget, and what that reveals about where fiscal power over Indian schooling actually sits.
b. Alternative Financing of Education
Direct government provisioning is not the only model. This theme turns to financing mechanisms that decouple funding from provision and move resources closer to the family making the choice: Direct Benefit Transfers via smart cards, cash transfers, or vouchers chief among them. NEP 2020's proposal to separate school monitoring and standard-setting from direct provision makes a similar argument in regulatory terms; this theme asks what the equivalent move looks like in financing terms. Tuition-fee DBT, cash-linked entitlements, and voucher-style models are all more feasible than ever in India's digital-payments era, each with its own trade-offs in targeting, leakage, and school-side incentives, all worth weighing honestly before any of them scale nationally.
c. Levers of Cost: Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Assessment
Most of India's education budget is committed before a single policy decision gets made: the bulk of it goes to teacher salaries, pensions, and social security, largely because the system's design assumes one particular model of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. Change any one of those three and the cost structure changes with it: a curriculum built around rote memorisation and standardised high-stakes exams demands a different staffing, infrastructure, and assessment apparatus than one built around competency and continuous evaluation. This theme treats curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment not as pedagogical questions alone, but as the upstream design choices that determine how the rest of the education budget gets spent, and asks what it would take to give schools more room to make those choices themselves.
Conference Features
- Keynote Sessions with reform leaders and leading policymakers
- Presentations on public financing research
- Discussion on fiscal federalism and DBT in education
- Exhibition Zone for innovative education solutions
Why attend SCNC 2026?
- Engage with leading voices in the field
- Participate in evidence-based research discussions
- Connect with a cross-sector ecosystem of stakeholders
- Contribute to the discourse on education in India
Registration:
General Delegates: Rs. 3000
Limited student discounts are available. Please write to us to avail the discount.
Display your product:
Limited exhibition stalls available on a first-come, first-served basis
Contact the CCS Team: +918864856466 | scnc@ccs.in
