Parents who can afford to pay school fees should do so

While we hope that parents who can afford to pay the auxiliary fees to support their child's education should do so, this is simply not the case. Without some form of fees, schools with limited support are struggling to provide students with what they need. There needs to be a policy in place where those who can contribute do so for the benefit of all.

Debate school fee idea

21 Jul 2022

PRIME MINISTER Andrew Holness is right that no child should be excluded from school because of the failure of a parent to pay any fee, tuition or otherwise, imposed by the institution – if there is indeed such a plan by head teachers.

But the fact that Mr Holness felt compelled to issue the warning underlines the need for, as this newspaper has advocated, a robust discussion of the Patterson Report on the transformation of Jamaica’s education system. The relevant bit in this case is its recommendation for the financing of secondary schools. The Government is yet to show its hand on this question.

It is perhaps coincidental that the prime minister’s warning on Sunday followed quickly on last week’s call by Grace Batson, the principal of Jamaica’s top high school (based on examination results), Campion College, for an adjustment to the Government’s policy to allow schools to make some fees mandatory. The idea has echoes of the suggestion by the commission chaired by the writer and academic, Professor Orlando Patterson, that Mr Holness established to recommend ways to lift Jamaica’s education outcomes from the doldrums.

Campion is one of several Roman Catholic-owned schools in Jamaica. Like most similar schools, though churches and trusts own them and have sway over board appointments, the Government pays the salaries of teachers and for some infrastructural maintenance. The lines of demarcation have blurred. In recent years, though, churches and trusts have attempted to reassert influence and control via an organisation called the Ecumenical Education Committee (EEC).

For many years, the cost of high-school education in Jamaica was nominally free. However, parents were asked to pay a range of so-called auxiliary fees, from which they could presumably opt out. Except that the schools, with more than tacit support from the education ministry, largely treated the fees as obligatory.

Things changed in 2016, when the new Holness administration removed all requirements for fees, although it said that parents could be asked to make contributions on a clearly voluntary basis. In lieu of the lost income, the Government allocated an additional $17,000 per student to high schools, which was on top of the normal grant, which in 2020 was $11,500 per student.

Even as the Government argues that the overall $3.7 billion in compensatory allocation it provided at the time more than doubled the $1.5 billion in auxiliary fees collected in 2017, head teachers argued that it was inadequate to meet their requirements and that most parents, even those who could afford to contribute, mostly stopped doing so.

The impact has been disproportionately felt by schools with poorer students. Those well-endowed alumni and parents do better at raising private money, although Ms Batson argued that all schools needed the auxiliary fees to help deliver good-quality, 21st-century education.

“My principal colleagues are tired,” she said. “I know they have been beating themselves up trying to convince their parents to pay. This is what we do morning, noon and night.”

While he chided parents who could afford to contribute but did not as “mean-spirited”, Mr Holness made it clear that it was contrary to government policy for students to be turned back for not paying fees. He reminded principals who may be inclined to do so in the wake of budgetary pressures, that for two years, when most schools were out, their institutions received their normal allocations. “Don’t put any obstacles, come September (the start of the school year) for children to come back to school,” he said.

Notwithstanding the prime minister’s label for who can afford the fees, but didn’t, the Government’s original framing and selling of the policy, including its clumsy roll-out six years ago, left the sense that parents were completely liberated from fees. An end to all obligations.

The current circumstance, however, provides an opportunity for a review of the policy, starting with a mature but robust discussion of the Patterson-led commission’s proposal for an end to the one-sizefits-all approach to high-school funding, and for its replacement with a nuanced system that takes into account a range of markers which influence need.

Said the report: “The system of parental contributions should involve a progressive system of school fees, wherein middle- and high-income households are required to contribute to financing the cost of their children’s education, while poor households that cannot afford such contributions are exempt (but are the beneficiary of a comparable level of per student state support). The parental contributions will not necessarily be expended on the schools to which their children attend, but rather will be allocated to all schools on a per-student basis. The penalty for non-compliance and the enforcement arrangements for collection of nonpayments will never include prohibitions on student enrolment or attendance, but may involve adverse credit reporting, penalty and interest charges, and other civil remedies.”

Acceptance of these suggestions may not be universal in every detail, but there is, we believe, broad support for the espoused principles. We are just taking too long to discuss them.

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