Addressing the red lights

 The Peter O’Neill Government’s Tuition Fee Free (TFF) policy is by far the most popular policy intervention that has really reduced the perennial financial burden on parents and guardians across the length and breadth of Papua New Guinea.  

The TFF policy has not only eased the financial burden of paying school fees but transferred the responsibility of paying school fees to the State.  

The introduction of the TFF policy in 2012 has brought about increased enrolment at all levels of schools, beginning from the elementary school right through to Grade 12 level.  

Many schools are now complaining about overcrowding in the classrooms with hugely disproportionate teacher per students ratio and textbook per students ratio.   

Despite this, increases in overall enrolment of female students and marginalised students wouldn’t have been realised if it hadn’t been for the introduction of the TFF policy.  

Similarly, growth in physical infrastructure development at all levels or categories of school systems have markedly increased.  So there is obviously physical expansion of school buildings and infrastructures.  

However, similar increases or growth in terms of procurement of educational material such as books and textbooks are lagging.   

The TFF policy would be seen as the policy that addresses access and equity domains of universal basic education (UBE).  This expansion consequently brings about a significant improvement in gross enrolment ratio and net enrolment ratio.  

PNG’s gross enrolment ratio and net enrolment ratio have been poor over many years compared with most developing countries. 

The TFF policy empowers PNG students to be educated up to Grade 12 level to best develop their intellectual potential which wasn’t possible in the last four decades.

The red lights

Many machines have systems of instrumentation such as temperature, speedometer and fuel gauges.  

The gauge detects the state of the machine and communicates the information by way of flashing red lights.  

Similarly, the state of implementing the TFF funds has several red lights in the way warnings and advise are communicated through the printed media and even the social media, such as Facebook or Twitter.

While the TFF policy has been introduced with the best of intentions to address access and equity domains of UBE, the government must not ignore the ‘red lights’ flashing on the dashboard of the TFF policy implementation. Red lights on a dashboard indicate that there is something wrong or likely to be wrong if the warning is unheeded. The decision makers and leaders would be foolish to ignore such warnings.

Below are some of the ‘red lights’ flashing in PNG’s different sector of the community.

Letters to the Editor

A letter to the editor in The National (April 16, 2015) ‘Probe Hela school books before releasing more funds’, and another letter to The National (May 4, 2015), p.43) ‘Free education has to be physically monitored’, and a letter to the Post Courier (April 16, 2015) ‘Free education plan not best’, are clear examples of how people in the community have seen the TFF funds been administered and sounded the warning to the authorities to do something to make sure the funds are not abused. 

The individuals are raising the ‘red flag’ to indicate that there is something wrong where care and attention is required.  

Letters to the editor such as these three letters are a litmus test of public opinion, scrutiny and expectations for improvement in the way TFF funds are managed and distributed.

These views are opinions of individuals but they wrote with concerns for PNG to achieve the best.  

They are not directly in a position to influence decisions but the fact that they expressed their views to see an improvement is in itself valuable evidence for decision makers to use these personal experiences of ‘hard evidence’ to shape and influence decisions for public good based on public views and expressions.

Newspaper articles

Newspaper articles with the headlines: ‘Chan requests TFF funds release’ (Sunday Chronicle, May 3, 2015, p.5), and Henzy Yakham’s commentary: ‘Audit education fund usage’ (Pacific Business Review, May 2, 2015, p.19), clearly indicate that the implementation of TFF policy, and particularly the distribution of TFF funds, needs careful audit, analysis and reform for improved management and administration of TFF funds.  

There have been numerous cases where schools have gone to the media to threaten to close their schools if their TFF funds were not disbursed before the school year or the school terms starts.  

What we don’t know is whether these schools are genuine schools or one of the many ‘ghost schools’ that sound the warning with their ulterior motives to gain from TFF funds.  

What we don’t know is whether these schools have proper records (school census data) required by the Department of Education as such is a requirement before TFF funds are remitted to the schools.  

Critical among the information required is the school’s bank account details. Did these schools have proper and correct bank accounts opened in the name of the genuine school registered under the Department of Education?  

Further, we need to verify whether the recipients of the TFF funds (genuine or ghost schools) have acquitted for the funds disbursed the previous year or the last batch of payment. 

It obviously means that the implementation process has deep rooted problems that need revitalisation. Schools and their head teachers have not performed their financial management responsibilities before screaming for more.  

Even the Department of Education was adding to the inefficiency by not having the correct facts and figures to argue and counter argue on which schools are genuinely in trouble for TFF funds and which schools are making unnecessary noises to discredit the good work of the Government and the Department of Education.  

If proper checks and balances are conducted, we shall not be surprised that the schools and the head teachers who have been making the loudest noises are either those who do not have proper financial management experiences or spent their TFF funds on areas of expenditures they were not supposed to, according to my circular instruction (while I was a Secretary for Education in 2012) to guide the schools on TFF funds expenditures.