The implementation of the Tuition Fee free policy has cost the National Government over four billion kina so far, since its inception in 2012. Now into its seventh year, research conducted by the National Research Institute’s Universal Basic Education team reveals that the policy seems to be creating more problems than before. While retention and access rates have dramatically improved, the question of quality education is now an issue. Preliminary findings from the research on reviewing the quality of universal basic education, conducted nationwide in 2018 reveals that there are a lot more problems faced by schools now than prior to the policy.
The National Research Institute's UBE Senior Research Fellow Dr Kilala Devette Chee says they range from over-crowding, lack of infrastructure to cater for increasing number of children, and debt-ridden schools as a result of late disbursement of funds among many others. “There’s not enough classrooms, desks and resources, textbooks and so forth. “So children are now sharing. In some schools, teachers are actually taking their students out under the trees and in others if there are not enough classrooms, teachers are timetabling themselves. “They’ll [teachers] be under the tree but if there are tests or something like that, they will timetable themselves so they will use that one classroom for how many grades or how many classes in that grade. “They really cannot manage the teacher pupil ratio. Before it was supposed to be one is to thirty or one is to forty, but that has drastically changed. “The town areas or urban areas, its now one is to eighty or ninety and in some schools in NCD, its one is to one hundred,” Dr. Devette-Chee said. NBC News Comments are closed.
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