The quality of a school's physical learning environment and the accessibility of its teaching and learning facilities remain among the most consistently documented determinants of student engagement and academic performance, yet public secondary schools across much of Nigeria continue to operate with overcrowded classrooms, inadequate instructional materials and limited access to laboratories, libraries and information and communication technology facilities. This study examined the relationship between participatory budgeting, the school learning environment, students' accessibility to teaching and learning facilities, and academic performance within public secondary schools under the Akwa Ibom State Ministry of Education. Anchored on School-Based Management Theory, the study adopted a descriptive survey research design, administering a structured questionnaire to Ministry officials, school administrators, teachers and senior secondary school students, with 230 of 250 distributed instruments properly completed and returned. Data were analysed using mean and standard deviation to answer the research questions, while regression analysis was used to test the study's central hypothesis at the 0.05 level of significance. Findings revealed that participatory budgeting is positively and significantly associated with improvements in classroom conditions, infrastructure and the availability of teaching materials, with students' accessibility to classrooms, laboratories, libraries and information and communication technology facilities showing a similarly positive, though comparatively more modest, association, and academic performance showing a strong positive relationship with participatory budgeting practice overall, explaining approximately fifty two per cent of the variance in perceived educational effectiveness. The study concludes that participatory budgeting functions as an effective mechanism for improving the physical and material conditions under which teaching and learning occur in Nigerian public secondary schools, and recommends prioritised investment in facility improvement guided by stakeholder input, deliberate attention to closing the comparatively wider information and communication technology access gap identified in the study, and the institutionalisation of participatory needs assessment as a standing feature of school-level budget planning.

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