Kombra, time to walk to talk

TWO Education Department secretaries have been removed, apparently over the implementation of the National Government’s tuition fee free (TFF) policy initiative.
An investigation was also instituted to identify and remove any impediment in the smooth operation of an education policy generally acclaimed for its impact, relieving thousands of parents struggling with annual education costs for their children.
That shows how important this education policy is to the O’Neill Government.  And the government has not merely laid it out on paper but has actually injected funding into it, funding which comes out at the receiving end either in cash or school materials.
But it appears the Education Department has still not got it right. What the Government and public is concerned about is not some slight clerical error but turns out to be a deliberate ploy to hijack the government policy by middle men and even school administrators themselves to get more than their share of the government money.
When the TFF policy was first introduced there were obviously a lot of concerns raised by school boards, the PNG Teachers Association and heads of schools about such matters like overcrowding in classrooms and a shortage of teachers to cater for the increased numbers of children.
Nothing of that was as shocking as revelations by Education Minister Nick Kuman and his Secretary Dr Uke Kombra in 2015.
Kombra said at that time that about 2,000 schools have deliberately inflated or falsified enrolment figures in order to get more than their fair share of the government’s tuition fee free education money.  The anomalies were picked up by the department’s database at Waigani.
The million-kina TFF fund had turned out to be rich pickings for some mischievous public servants and their cohorts. The inflated figures were passed on from schools to district education managers to provincial standard officers and fed into the Waigani data bank without any care for cross-checks or validation.
Provinces do not always crosscheck the figures to validate the data received from schools. The Education Secretary then now instructed all education standard officers to ensure that all data on enrolment must be validated properly before they are submitted to the department headquarters. These officers would be made to account for any anomaly uncovered.
Minister Kuman’s announcement of K50 million unaccounted for in 2015 was based on the data from the tuition fee free commodity component report.
Enrolment data used to be collected from each province through the quarterly figures. A new system was introduced after 2006 when the department decided to collect more information on students, teachers and infrastructure.
The school census forms were then issued to schools at the beginning of the year for each school to complete and to send to the provincial education office and Waigani by March 31.
According Kombra, it is the standard officers in the provinces whose job it is to collect and validate the enrolment figures of schools.  While the standard officers are based at provincial headquarters level, there are also district education managers in each of the 89 districts in the country who are expected to collect such information even if it means by physically visiting schools to verify annual enrolment numbers.
Unfortunately, that had not been the case and indications were that those officers concerned had failed in their jobs or had acted in tandem with school heads to relay unverified and inflated enrolment figures to their respective provincial officers to feed the national database.
Such action or omission on the part of the district and provincial education authorities had been the cause of millions of kina being paid to “ghost schools”.
Fortunately, the department identified the source of wastage in its systems so it was incumbent on Secretary Kombra and his provincial education officials to starting correcting those matters to avoid such dishonesty and misuse repeating.
Kombra is now faced with a new challenge of ensuring that schools do not charge additional fees this year.
He issued another instruction last week to all principals and school boards that they would be suspended if they continued to burden parents and guardians with unnecessary “project fees”.
A similar instruction was issued last year that was totally ignored by school managements and boards as they continued to collect fees from parents and guardians while benefitting from the TFF funds.
The Education Secretary needs to walk his talk or stop issuing instructions that have not effect at all.