Aihi wants ghost schools verified

By JEFFREY ELAPA
SEVERAL schools have submitted bank account particulars of their board chairmen, while ghost schools need to be verified, the provincial governors’ conference was told.
Minister for Education Paru Aihi said during the conference at a resort outside of Port Moresby, that about 20% of the free tuition fees had not been disbursed to the school names provided because they did not have bank accounts.
Aihi said some of the schools listed were bogus and bank details provided were for board chairmen or head teachers.
He said payments would be made this week into the accounts provided.
He said the school fees subsidy would be paid in two components, commodity and cash grants for administrative purposes.
He said while the payments for the next  school year were yet to be paid, it was unfortunate and unacceptable to see the Department of Education and provincial education divisions not having statistics on the number of students and schools in respective provinces.
Aihi said university students would be used to collect data throughout the country during the Christmas holidays to have updated enrolment and establishment of data.
“This is unacceptable. We cannot run schools and the department without data,” he said.
He said schools had placed the government in a situation where money for tuition fee subsidies was not
disbursed.
He proposed to the provincial governors to allow the provincial education advisers and standards officer to come under the Department of Education as the department would pay for vehicles for
them.
He said the outcome-based education concept would be phased out next year because it had not served its purpose and would be replaced with objective-based learning.
He said several officers in the department would be investigated by the Task Force Sweep team.