Project fees

EDUCATION Secretary and the parents throughout the country continue to raise concerns over principals and headmasters of secondary and primary schools charging so-called ‘project fees’ as conditions for enrolments of students.
The project fees component is already covered in the tuition fee free (TFF) subsidy payments, so why pester the parents with such?
Unfortunately, this had been happening since the initial inception of the TFF policy of ‘no school fees’ and ‘no project fees’ by the current Government, from 2012 onwards.
These subsidies are based on enrolment details provided by respective schools to the Education Department.
Some provinces, for example Morobe and New Ireland, have continued to direct their education division to encourage schools to charge parents with project fees, unilaterally against the National Government’s TFF policy.
Their main reasons being that these subsidies are paid into the various schools’ accounts very late in the year, that at times, the amount paid is not in full, and also to cater for their infrastructure maintenance projects.
This trend has now been changed to have these TFF subsidies disbursed early in the school calendar year, which was the case, early this year 2019 and last year 2018.
These changes should, therefore, not be given as excuses by the school management to charge parents project fees as conditions for enrolment.
It must be stressed here, however, that relevant provincial authorities have continued to neglect schools with their maintenance requirements. Classroom buildings, teachers’ housing, toilet facilities, and other conditions are deteriorating by the year without adequate and proper maintenance.
Should not the provincial services improvement programme (PSIP) and district services improvement programme (DSIP) functional grants cater for schools’ infrastructure maintenance requirements so as to avoid school management not to misuse the TFF subsidies?
School managements should not be bothered by these school maintenance requirements but concentrate on implementation of the TFF policy, amongst others, to improve quality of education for our children and strengthen our education management systems.
Parents and citizen committees, school boards of management and relevant provincial government education officials (school inspectors and education advisors), should be taking proactive measures in ensuring that TFF subsidies are properly implemented to fulfil its key objectives.
Since the initial inception of the TFF policy in 2012, schools tend to give their reasons to collect project fees, to cater for the school’s project requirements.
But as alluded to above, school infrastructure is in totally dilapidated condition.
One would wonder if these so-called project fees, collected annually, are ever used to carry out maintenance of the school’s infrastructure projects at all.
Relevant provincial and national authorities, including both Education Department and the Auditor-General should therefore undertake to carry out audits throughout schools to check how project fees had been managed by principals and headmasters of secondary and community schools since 2012.

Lorenitz Gaius
Ketskets village