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JCTR STUDY ON EDUCATION REVEALS NO FREE PRIMARY EDUCATION IN ZAMBIA, CALLS FOR SCALING UP OF BURSARIES AND SCHOOL FEEDING PROGRAMMES AUGUST 2006 According to research conducted by the Social Conditions Research Project of the JCTR, free education in Zambia only exists on paper, with some basic schools continuing to administer PTA or Project Fees for primary education and all parents needing to mobilise resources to purchase uniforms, books, supplies, etc. “Free education” at government primary schools continues to be unaffordable to the most vulnerable households in Zambia. This major finding was revealed on Wednesday, 23rd August 2006, at the launch of the JCTR Research Report “How Free is Free Education? The Cost of Education in Lusaka.” The study, undertaken in the third term of the 2005 school year, sought to establish the total direct (e.g., user fee, PTA fee, project fee, etc.) and indirect (e.g., uniforms, books/supplies, transportation, private tuitions, etc.) costs of various types of education in Lusaka, including government primary education, junior secondary education (grades 8-9), senior secondary education (grades 10-12) and community school education. It also hoped to answer questions such as “How free is free education?” “How has the free education policy impacted accessibility and quality of primary education?” “What would happen if the free education policy was expanded to secondary levels?” and “How do community schools compare to government basic schools, in terms of both accessibility and quality.” According to JCTR Researcher Chris Petrauskis, “This important study on cost of education resulted from the many stories emerging in Lusaka compounds about families failing to send their children to government basic schools, even with the free education policy in place. Even more saddening is a situation captured in one of the monthly interviews undertaken by the JCTR with families in high-density compounds, where a young girl was unable to afford a school uniform to attend the government basic school. Therefore, she was enrolled at a community school but later stopped attending school because her classmates ridiculed her for wearing worn-out clothes.” According to the report findings, the average annual total cost of “free” primary education at a government school in Lusaka is K450,000, with approximately K10,000 due to the school as a PTA or Project Fee and an estimated average of K440,000 spent indirectly on purchasing uniforms/shoes and books/supplies. At both junior (grades 8-9) and senior (grades 10-12) secondary levels, the direct annual cost of secondary school is approximately K300,000, while the estimated average indirect cost is approximately two times (K670,000) and four times (K1,270,000) higher at junior and senior levels respectively. “In other words,” said Petrauskis, “due to these “hidden” indirect costs of education like uniforms, transportation, packed lunches, and so on, a free education policy in itself is insufficient to achieve 100% enrolment of pupils in school.” Other major findings of the report include that 1) parents from higher density areas tend to invest lower amounts of money on education for their children, especially in terms of school lunches and private tuitions at senior secondary level, which may be jeopardising the ability of poorer students to excel at school, 2) only half of study participants perceived that the free education policy has made primary education more accessible to pupils, and 3) the majority of parents perceived a decrease in school quality at government basic schools, mainly linked to poor performance and remuneration of teachers, teacher strikes and the practice of charging private tuitions. The study recommendations strongly call for more initiatives to address inequities in the education system, including scaling up of school bursaries at all levels and introduction of school feeding programmes to all schools. As Petrauskis explains “At this time, especially as Zambia strives to attain the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education by 2015, the Ministry of Education should prioritise the scaling-up of bursaries and targeted feeding programmes for poor and vulnerable students at all school levels, especially for girl-children. To ensure that poorer children are able to access and succeed in school, the Ministry of Education must make available incentives such as school vouchers, bursaries, free nutritious lunches, etc., and ensure that these initiatives are attractive enough to offset hidden costs of education, including the opportunity cost of a child not engaging in child labour.” Additional recommendations call for increased remuneration of teachers in Zambia, to at least meet the cost of basic needs, and for all community schools to remove any user fees, to increase the accessibility of these schools to the most marginalised in society. Donors in the education sector are called on to continue with the strong support of the education sector, while making these donations long-term and focused on improving school equity. Finally, the JCTR asks government to take caution as it considers extending free education to secondary levels, by first making available sufficient secondary school places and allocating sufficient grant money to offset the loss of revenue to schools. The expansion of Free Education to secondary levels is not clearly planned for in the Fifth National Development Plan, therefore it seems unlikely that resources will become available before 2010 to make this policy change. In the meantime, the focus of the Ministry of Education should be to continue with and greatly scale-up equity initiatives, such as bursary provision and school feeding programmes, that may prove more beneficial to extremely poor households. And voters should ask aspiring political candidates to explain how they will re-prioritise allocations in the National Budget to expand the free education policy through secondary education levels. |
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