Education sector has much to learn

THE education sector will continue to experience problems at all levels from elementary to tertiary.
These problems in part are unavoidable for a developing economy such as Papua New Guinea.
Perhaps the biggest challenge that faces the government at the moment is how to build the capacity of the system to cater for everyone.
For now, TFF (tuition fee-free fund) is one problem the state must deal with.
The reality is that student enrolment every year increases in the public schools but the TFF released does not correspond.
Education Minister Nick Kuman said last month the government was yet to pay schools K97 million in tuition fees for last year’s final term, plus another K50 million for this year’s first term.
Most times school are forced to either charge project fees or ask parents to pay upfront and later get reimbursed.
Others have no choice but to close off the school year early.
It is now more clear that the number of learning institutions simply cannot accommodate the growing ranks of students pouring into the secondary and tertiary levels on a yearly basis.
In pre-independence times the challenge that faced the colonial government was building up the ranks of skilled workers among the local population to eventually take over the Australian administration.
This would ensure that the sovereign state of PNG was for the most part self-governing and able to function as an independent entity.
The challenge then was really about getting as many of the best and brightest students to study and train to become the nation’s first administrators and managers as well as filling in the other positions in society in health, education, industry and so on.
Today, there are a lot more students, many of them bright and capable keen to learn and better themselves, but they are faced with a range of challenges one of which is the limited number of spaces available. With the bottleneck forming from the secondary to the university/college level, the system has responded by placing quotas on spaces.
It has done so in terms of the grade point average for courses as well as how a student’s choice (first to third) of institution put on their year 12 school-leaver form is actually another default screening process the system is forced to use to preen the top percentile for the privilege of
taking the most sought after courses.
This now means, guidance officers in schools must advise their pupils well with regards to choosing institutions and courses which would more likely to be successful in one of their choices.
But before that the battle to get educated begins at the elementary and primary school level where the conditions are not always conducive to learning with over-crowding and consequently a lack of adequate resources the usual hindrances to the sound educative process.
The challenge is also at the Education Department to set an official target for teacher-to-pupil ratio.
The third challenge facing students has nothing to
do with their ability but with money.
The amounts charged by schools, especially private institutions are restrictive and do not necessarily account for the background of the student despite his or her ability.
These are the main challenges facing the state and they are all addressable.