Gross unfairness in allocation

By Dr MUSAWE SINEBARE 

Introduction

THE Papua New Guinea Vision 2050 aspires for the country to become a ‘smart, wise, fair, healthy and happy’ society by the year 2050 (35 years away).  

In simple terms, PNG, as a nation, aspires to reach a point where its socio-economic indictors will reflect a standard of living of a middle-income country where its Human Development Index (HDI) will be ranked among the top 50 countries of the world. 

The O’Neill Government’s Free Education Policy (commonly known as Tuition Fee Free policy or TFF policy) is undoubtedly the first excellent step to improve and increase opportunities for millions of school-aged children (up to 1.5 million) to have access to general education (K-12 Education or in PNG, E-12 Education) providing Elementary to Grade 12 education.

The TFF policy is going to directly impact on the Universal Ba­sic Education (UBE) pillar on Access.  

Access to an educational establishment (school) near enough to where a child lives for all school-aged children is a huge task.  

Many school-aged children in PNG were denied access because of the many socio-economic, political, cultural and geographical barriers.  

Affordability of school fees for the greater majority of parents was the most prominent of all the barriers for many years before 2012.  

The TFF policy removed the school fee barrier for millions of parents and guardians, hence helps to increase access where more students are attending school.

However, other known barriers that force children out of school by either pull or push factors have yet to be addressed through another policy intervention.  

The other UBE pillars of retention, equity, quality, and management have yet to be vigorously addressed through other policy interventions just like the TFF policy addresses the access pillar. For example, a compulsory education policy could be the way to go in order to address all the UBE pillars.  

We know TFF policy greatly helped with addressing access but retention, equity, quality and management pillars are still going to affect PNG education indicators compounded by the trend in population growth. More children born means more schools, more classrooms, more teachers, more teachers’ houses, more laboratory spaces, more consumables in schools and more of everything.  

It means more nurses, doctors, hospital bed spaces and medical drugs. It means our roads will be crowded and traffic jams will increase. Services such as water and electricity demands will increase.  

The recent revelation that nearly one million school-aged children not in school or have no access to a school is confirmation of a stark reality that more and more students will find life outside of a classroom attractive than the life back in a classroom.  

Out-of-school children pose a challenge to all of us to make schooling, teaching, learning and being in school for the full cycle of education for school-age children a national issue to address UBE objectives.  

How can we make teaching and learning atmosphere in the classrooms attractive to retain school-age children in school for the full cycle from Elementary to Grade 12? 

In this commentary I would like to discuss a recent initiative taken by the Ministry of Education under the Government’s NEC Decision No. 228/2014 to use some of the 2014 TFF funds to support ‘Education infrastructure and quality education improvement programme’.  

The Tuition Fee Free Report (Ministry of Education 2014) provided detailed a breakdown of 2014 TFF funds appropriated to different sectors of the Education Department. 

The TFF policy is a welcome government policy intervention.  

Multitudes of parents are thankful and grateful that their perennial financial burdens are greatly eased.  

Free education is applauded by everybody, especially those who have felt the school fee burden is off their shoulders.  

In the excitement of the free education policy, parents and other stakeholders are happy that they are not only relieved off the monetary burden but have their children access to an educational opportunity where a school exists.  

However, parents and other stakeholders are silent on ‘quality of teaching and learning or quality of education’ issues as this falls outside of their realm.

Education infrastructure and quality education improvement programmes

The NEC Decision No.228/2014 attempts to address the Quality of Education (teaching and learning pillar of the Universal Basic Education).  There exists a secretariat established within the Ministry of Education to provide advice to the minister on where and how the 2014 TFF funds could be best utilised to support programmes that might help improve quality of education.

 Figure 1 shows the commitments made to support quality education improvement programmes in schools (in selected provinces).  

It is an extracted version of original ‘Table 16’ from Ministry of Education (2014) report. 

The detail of the NEC Decision No.228/2014 that establishes the ‘education infrastructure and quality education improvement programme’ and particularly the criteria used to distribute or commit the TFF funds to the selected provinces is unavailable to this writer.  

The fact that TFF funds are committed towards supporting quality education improvement programmes in PNG (in selected provinces) is commendable.  

We now have the right attitude to commit funds to support quality education improvement programmes in a dozen provinces.  What specific areas of quality education such a fund will support is yet to be disclosed; at least that bit is unclear from the Ministry of Education (2014) report. 

Some comments and critical questions 

Parents and stakeholders should take a closer look at Figure 1 and critically analyse the information contained in the table.  We need to critically analyse the information and ask some critical questions as to the validity, merit and rationale of the information contained in Figure 1.  The following are some of the critical questions one likes to bring to the attention of those who are concerned with what we say about providing quality education to the children and what we actually do in practice.

•  Is the total amount of K6,932,928.00 as given in Figure 1 correct?  By simple arithmetic one can tell that the figures add up to K7,234,105.10. Is a difference of K301,177.00 an insignificant amount to be overlooked? It is not even an error due to rounding. Someone obviously didn’t have the quality of education required in the first place in order to vouch for ‘quality education’ issues when simple arithmetic exercise such as this cannot be done correctly;
• Note that Figure 1 shows the list the commitments made to support quality education improvement programme when the intention is to include educational infrastructure as well. How much of the amounts listed account for ‘infrastructure’ and how much account for ‘quality education improvement programme’?
• Why are only 12 provinces selected over the rest of the 21 provinces in PNG? Are these provinces selected because they have instituted ‘quality education improvement programmes’ in their schools? Could this imply that the other pro­vinces do not have ‘quality education improvement programmes’? Could this mean they have fully ach­ieved the ‘quality education’ objectives?
• Simbu and Central are given a lion’s share (K2,340,000.00) of the TFF funds to support ‘quality education improvement programmes’.  What are the justifications for these two provinces to be given so much compared to others? Maybe the two provinces have not achieved sufficiently high ‘quality of education’ so a huge financial outlay is justified.  Where is the ‘fairness’ espoused in PNG Vision 2050 and equity in UBE?  How can one explain to New Ireland that an allocation of K20,000.00 (the lowest amount) is commensurate with their very high ratings in terms of their ‘quality education improvement programme’?
• The largest province in PNG, Morobe, is allocated K48,518.10, correct to the last 10 toea.  It’s laughable that a 10 toea is included in the allocation. Did Morobe send in a quotation to attract this allocation?  The smallest province in PNG, Manus is allocated K550,000? How fair are we to ourselves and our people? Why would New Ireland be allocated the lowest amount of K20,000?   
• The newest province, Jiwaka is allocated K50,000. Why is it that Hela, another newest province is not even featured in this list of provinces? By implication, Hela and others not featured in the table must have achieved ‘quality education’ objectives so they need not be considered for additional funds.
• Southern Highlands is allocated K85,590. People in SHP, Enga and Hela have recently complained in the print media that not many of their students made it to the universities in PNG. The Pass Rate is a measure of quality education under UBE, which then translates into Grade Point Average which is the determining factor in selection for admissions into universities and colleges. If that measure of quality of learning is ignored in allocating funds to provinces where such financial injection is critical demonstrates that we are not serious with providing quality education to our people. 
• The total amount of money allocated to Simbu (or Central) is eight times more than what is committed to SHP and Enga combined.  How can we justify this gross unfairness? Even the total amount allocated to WHP, NCD, Manus and AROB combined (K2,050,000) is less than half the sum allocated to Simbu and Central (K4,680,000). What guarantee is there that funds allocated to Simbu (or Central) are immune to abuse?