EDITORIAL - Concerns over tuition-free education

It is common knowledge that early childhood education is key to the development of a person, which could chart his or her path to academic and other success - or help derail that end. It is even commoner knowledge that Jamaica has, for the most part, underinvested in the framework of basic schools. And this concern has fuelled the drive by the Early Childhood Commission for standardisation to bring order to the system.

Education Minister Andrew Holness last week reaffirmed the commitment of the governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) to enshrine education as a fundamental right of the Jamaican child, shorn of mandatory tuition fees at even early childhood institutions. "Jamaica is moving towards free early childhood education. Next week, we will vote in Parliament on constitutional amendments which will bring into it the bill of rights, and part of the rights that Jamaica will have will be the right to free tuition at the primary and pre-primary level," Mr Holness said.

While the minister's plan builds on the ambitions of the JLP, which were expressed in its election manifesto in 2007, the feasibility of such an initiative could be stymied by harsh realities, both economic and cultural. For the campaign to even insist on the admission of students - irrespective of the capacity or willingness of parents and guardians to pay auxiliary fees - to public secondary schools was met with resistance by some teachers and administrators who argued that the ministry's subvention could not keep institutions afloat. Tuition-free education, the argument goes, while a laudable objective, is more utopian than realistic in light of the lack of infrastructure and resources in public schools to optimally educate children.

Can we afford it?

The fundamental concern is whether the Government, in the near future, has the budgetary capacity to underwrite tuition fees for the nearly 3,000 early childhood institutions in Jamaica.

If not, parents might observe a trend, as was evident in some secondary schools, where administrators were accused of raising auxiliary charges to compensate for the abolition of tuition fees. That would bring us back to square one, with rejigged accounting maintaining the status quo.

And there are other concerns. Many basic schools were developed in an ad hoc manner and are run more by the sweat of the brow than by transparent management and systems of accountability.

Just last month, Professor Maureen Samms-Vaughan, chairman of the Early Childhood Commission, lamented that reports on the health status at basic schools showed that only 36 per cent were satisfactory. While guarding against seeming alarmist, Mrs Samms-Vaughan said safety measures at some schools are woefully inadequate. "Probably the most challenging thing with the fire department is that some schools have only one entry and exit door. You know that is a major fire hazard, because if a fire starts right at the door, then everybody will be in trouble," she said.

It is with these considerations, as well as concerns about teacher competence, that we urge the education ministry to tread carefully on the matter of abolition of fees in early childhood institutions. The ministry must assure the nation that the absence of such fees will not further compromise the quality of education delivery, and that implementation follows wide consultation and buy-in. The impact of this decision is too weighty to be grounded in ideology, and not feasibility.

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