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Sierra Leone shrugs off hurdles in bold free school effort

Wednesday July 31 2019
By KEMO CHAM

An academic year has gone but a large section of pupils at Mayosso Secondary School were taught in fits and starts.

Out of the school’s 10 teachers, only three teachers were attending classes.

The others were protesting over their names missing on the list of government-approved teachers.

Mayosso Secondary School, located in the northern Tonkolili District, is a microcosm of the chaos that characterizes arguably the most ambitious project of President Julius Maada Bio’s government – free education.

The Free Quality Education (FQE) is a fulfilment of his campaign pledge to build human capital as a key pillar of development in donor dependent Sierra Leone.

The scheme targeting more than 2 million primary and secondary school pupils covers admission and tuition fees as well as academic materials, uniforms, shoes and meals.

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When he officially launched it last September, President Bio said it would be implemented in phases.

The first phase was to abolish fees, provide books and put in place relevant monitoring structures.

By the second year, which begins in September, the other benefits would be realized.

According to the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education (MoBSE) in-take in secondary schools has trebled and 90,000 pupils have joined primary schools above the number last year.

This has exposed the country’s readiness for the scheme whose key goals are access, quality, retention, completion, and post-completion.

Alphonso Manley of the Civil Rights Coalition (CRC) said there was a huge deficit in infrastructure like classrooms, WASH facilities and the working conditions of teachers.

“With access, there is a huge need for facilities like classrooms, teachers, teaching and other materials,” he said.

In Maborie, a small village outside Magburaka, the headquarters Town of Tonkolili District, lessons at the village’s only primary are seasonal.

The school’s dilapidated main classroom block and a makeshift thatched structure for classes 3 and 5, cannot shelter children from the rains which come for five months in a year.

The picture is worse in some other parts of the country, says Joseph Lamin, who works in the office of the National Coordinator of the FQE in the MoBSE.

“I saw children sat on the ground to take lessons,” he said narrating his experience in a recent MoBSE assessment of schools nationwide.

'Athens of West Africa'

An estimated Le66 billion ($7million) was spent on subvention for about 4, 000 schools in the first and second terms of the academic year, according to the MoBSE.

The Teaching Service Commission budgeted for 5, 000 new teachers to be recruited in September and received 10, 000 applications.

Education took 21 per cent of the Sierra Leone’s national budget and further spending could accentuate the wage bill and go against the wishes of key development partners.

Donor pledges for FQE are also taking long to be realized. Mr Manley suggests the government should declare an emergency in education in order to attract more funds which should be spent judiciously.

President Bio sees FQE as an effort to restore the country’s leadership in west Africa on the education front.

Between 1827 and 1948, Sierra Leone was nicknamed the ‘Athens of West Africa’ as it accommodated at Fourah Bay College students from Ghana, Nigeria, Liberia, Gambia and other west Africa countries.

The college is now bedevilled by examination malpractice and recurrent strikes by teachers and students.

Civil war disruption

Part of the problem was civil war during which 1,270 schools were destroyed, leaving about two in three children out of school as of 2001.

There have been improvements but more than 200,000 children are believed to be still out of school.

After a presidential commission of enquiry, Sierra Leone added one more year to secondary school in 2012 to adopt a 6-3-4-4 education system.

Under the new system, the government will stop offering education in shifts, cut-down the teacher student ratio to 50 from as high as 300 and increase contact hours.

Teachers in Sierra Leone remain among the least paid of Public Servants, despite recent improvements in their terms of service.

With the launch of the FQE, Sierra Leone joins a sizeable group of looking to make education affordable, if not wholly free. The Gambia and Ghana are providing tuition-free education at primary level.

South Africans are debating on how to fund a free education program for university students as proposed by ex-president Jacob Zuma.

Kenya has since 2003 progressively moved from free primary to free day secondary education and to subsidized secondary boarding.

It is also now sponsoring all students to polytechnics and technical colleges while university education is partially funded through student loans.

New schools census

In a sense, the past 10 months have shown Sierra Leone did not know exactly what it was getting into.

Lack of data on school and student population has forced the government to conduct two school census since the idea of the FQE was floated.

The latest enumeration started in mid-June seeking to make distribution of subsidies more reliable and transparent.

Only government owned and government assisted schools are catered for in the FQE.

Beneficiary schools are entitled to a yearly subvention, learning materials, furniture, and all their qualified teachers are included in the government payroll.

The government found itself swamped with a bigger number of applications than expected as community schools - in far-flung and neglected parts of Sierra Leone found an opportunity to regularize their status.

According to the MoBSE, in the first three months of the scheme, it received over 3000 applications for approval but only 1000 met the conditions.

After notification subsidies take long to reflect in the schools’ bank accounts.

Many teachers of the schools passed under FQE are also yet to receive PIN codes, which qualify them to receive monthly salaries.

It is the reason for disruption of programmes at Mayosso Secondary Schools.

Teachers in community schools

Most of those affected are untrained teachers from community schools who are recruited locally as PIN codes are issued only to qualified teachers.

Community schools were previously fully funded by parents.

“Parent are no longer willing to pay fees since they heard about the free education, says Paul Driscole Koroma, Head teacher of Mayosso Secondary School.

“They don’t know that the government hasn’t sent any money to the school. And how can we pay the teachers and buy chalk?,” he lamented.

Pupils at the school only spend the day running and playing around the school campus.

MoBSE attributed delays in receiving subsidies to late applications, wrong or missing bank accounts for schools.

Mr Lamin also said some disbursements were swallowed up by banks because of overdrafts that schools had incurred.

Some schools also inflated their registers to get more money in subventions, prompting the second school census.

“Some schools have been found to have two different registers: the genuine one and doctored one for FQE purposes,” said Lamin.

Mr Lamin, however, sees the challenges as teething problems. “You can never start a program that is problem free,” he said.

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