Education system failing everyone

THE expansionary education system in Papua New Guinea did not have any detailed planning, policy, and implementation assessment before it was implemented in the country.
As a result there has been an explosion in the number of enrollments and school leavers.
The biggest victim of the expansionary education system is our country and the government.
The nation is faced with a very large and growing population of school leavers with poor knowledge of science, English and social sciences, compounded with very poor command of verbal and written English skills.
The Government is increasingly becoming desperate to raise funds to finance the education system, with significant cost at the expense of the tax payers. The education system has become a major liability for the Government and tax payers, with a significant deterioration in the quality of education.
There is no point in pushing more resources into our education system, when it is not delivering the desired outcome.
When the Government took office in 2019, it partially abolished the free education policy and introduced the Help loan scheme for tertiary education.
The scheme is essentially another form of free handout and free education policy, so in the end, there has been no or little change to the free education policy.
In time, the loan scheme will become expensive and very difficult for the Government to manage.
The Government should curtail and down-size the education system and reintroduce the scholarship system for the top 10 per cent of all government-run and funded tertiary institutions which had existed in the 1970s to the 1980s.
With the reversion to the standard based education system at the lower levels of education, this will help to improve the quality of outputs from our education system.
The Government should introduce an ‘Equity Loan Scheme’ for students from remote districts who are attending government-run tertiary institutions, where communities do not have access to any form of income earning opportunities.
Clear eligibility criteria and accountability audits should be implemented to prevent miss-use of the equity loan scheme.

Concerned citizen,
Pom