Fate of the private schools

THIS IS a humble appeal to the Ministry of Education to reconsider the decision not to offer enough financial support to privately operated schools for them to survive. This approach to the Government is couched respectfully because anyone familiar with the system must appreciate the tremendous financial and administrative pressure under which state agencies are operating at this time. It is a hard time to be a minister.

After all, no one knows how long, or to what extent, the novel coronavirus is going to afflict us. What is certain, though not yet quantified, is the precipitous fall in revenue, more than enough to wipe out the higher-than-budgeted collections of the recent past.

More dangerous, second only to the death threatened by the virus, is the deeply held but subliminal illusion that we will soon be able to rebound to the lifestyle, the consumption patterns, of the recent past. And to that end, please note that everyone is looking to the Government for money to cope for the short and maybe even the long haul.

And don’t even get us on to the announcements from the financial sector about fees, exchange rates and foreign currency. They seem to have no connection with the daily peril of ordinary citizens. Or is it that they know more than we do about their brittle circumstances or their determination to continue the customary misapplication of our money?

LOW PRIORITY

In this context of poor choices, which translates into hunger and restlessness among the majority of the population, the education budget is relegated to a low priority as far as further allocations are concerned. Teachers are watching but maintaining ‘social distance’ from hard policy decisions. Parents are at their wits’ end trying to cope with lockdown, and children have no talk.

It is going to hurt everyone badly, probably irretrievably, not to have school resume until September. We should follow the British plan to resume primary grades and exam-taking students early next month, with a regimen of staggering schooldays, blended, where possible, with distance learning.

My main plea, however, is for the near 2,000 privately sponsored earlychildhood institutions that are almost entirely dependent on parental fees, many of which have already or will soon close for good. If these institutions are not assisted, even minimally, with staff costs and food assistance, tens of thousands of children will have to stay at home because there is no government-run facility to receive them. The Brain Builders Programme will have been scuttled.

There will be no fanfare, probably no protest – just degradation of little lives and incalculable damage to national productivity. These schools were barely surviving anyway. They are not dispensable appendages of the public system. They need rationalising, but we cannot do without them.

If the Government was brave enough to induce flexibility to public teachers’ terms of service and imaginatively devote surplus agricultural production to the School Feeding Programme, the impending debacle in the early-childhood sector could be averted within existing funding.

Then there are the near 600 private grade schools, inexplicably and mistakenly characterised as profit-making businesses, whose fate, apparently and cruelly, is to be left to the crosswinds of market forces. Were many to close or lose their best teachers, what will befall the 30,000-plus students so displaced? Which primary schools will have any space, much less quality slots, for these children? And how many billions would any such public placement cost the State? Surely, vastly more than to offer a temporary lifeline to effective private schools.

Timing is critical. The shape of the educational system for the next year and onwards will be determined by the end of June at the latest. Since they are not sure which private schools will survive and their pockets are bare, some parents are already trying to migrate their children from preparatory to primary schools. If that tendency escalates, later assistance will not abate the confusion.

I support Peter Bunting’s demand for the National Council on Education to lead a comprehensive discussion on the architecture and financing of education going forward. Absent that, the Ministry of Education, preoccupied with just keeping the operation going, will likely stick to beaten paths; so changeresistant is the system, so powerful are entrenched elements.

My fear is that we will end up with further compromised education and compounded wastage of human talent. And, in our defensive self-denial, we won’t even realise what we have done to our future.

Dr Eric Williams, in his magisterial writings, warns us: “Ideas created by certain interests often last well after those interests have been destroyed, and do even greater damage then”. Please let us not destroy the private schools.