Worse yet to come in new academic year

 THE Government’s Free Education Policy is interfering with the smooth flow of the student enrollment process throughout the country. With the major education policy changes due to affect student enrollments at all levels of the education system, the worse is yet to be witnessed in the 2017 academic year.

The media report that some schools in the Highlands cannot cater for new students is just a fraction of issues faced by many schools, colleges and even universities today.

In the case of Tari Secondary School, the school has only five classrooms that can only accommodate 275 students, about 50 to 55 students per class as reported. The 50 to 55 students in a class is even far beyond a teacher pupil ratio of 1:35 as outlined in the PNG National Education Plan, which is a costly plan formulated by high profile educationists and academics with immense funding from donor agencies aboard.

Although changes done or made to the education system is expected to comply with the anticipated 2050 year plans accorded in the National Plan for Education in PNG, the plans seem to deviate away from achieving affirmative results in  the recent past.  

Accordingly, it is a total waste of time and public money in developing and printing the ill coordinated “National Plan for Education” resource materials, when the implementation process is not delivering results in align with the costly plans. Definitely, all plans projected for the next 20 or so years under the Education Capacity Building Program has no value and meaning in the country’s education sector to date.

An illiterate person can reasonably explain that schools cannot enroll more students when there is lack of infrastructure, such as classrooms, teaching and learning resource materials and teacher accommodations.

How can the National Executive Council endorse policies that are no closer to achieving results?

There is hardly any school infrastructure to align with the TFF programme. 

The subsequent abolishing of Grade 8 and 10 exams is adding more fuel to the fire. The TFF programme is a total waste of public money that should have been used to increase school, college and university infrastructure to accommodate for the increasing student enrollment every year.

As a parent  for children attending grade 8 and 10 this year, I am not sure as to how or what sort of student selection criteria will be used to select the current grade 8 and 10 students to move onto Grade 9 and 11, now that the Grade 8 and 10 national exams has been done away with. 

Practically, national exams had provided an effective student grading and filtration system, permitting only few or the best students to move onto the next level of education.

With the abolishing of Grade 8 and 10 exams, the worst is yet to be witnessed in 2017 academic year where a great number of students completing grade 8 and 10 this year will be using all available resources to move into grade 9 and 11.

Parents bribing school principals are more prevalent in many primary and secondary schools in the urban centres. 

This confirms that money will become one of those hidden selection criteria and I would like to appeal to all parents to start saving money in preparation for the 2017 school year and beyond.  

With money, success rate is well over 100 per cent.

Ken Nandawa

NCD