Maravi

(NEWZIMBABWE) State pays fees for a million students

COMMENT - The MDC and their backers had better not pretend that free education was their idea. It was the ZANU-PF which introduced it, and it is the MDC which wants a fee based system - they are neoliberals.

State pays fees for a million students
by Lunga Sibanda
09/11/2010 00:00:00

CLOSE to a million primary and secondary school students had their fees or levies paid for by the government over the last year, it has been revealed.

The government also picked the exam fees of at least 18,000 ‘O’ and ‘A’ Level students, according to Stephen Mahere, the permanent secretary in the Education Ministry.

Mahere said the students who received government support had demonstrated a certain level of need, and the help had been rendered under the government’s Basic Education Assistance Module (BEAM), which is aimed at assisting less-privileged pupils.

At least 600,000 pupils who received government support were in secondary school, and over 200,000 more in primary school.

Zimbabwe’s education sector is seeing an upturn after a decade of declining standards owing to an unstable economic and political environment. The government is now paying a stable monthly wage in United States dollars for teachers, and work boycotts which were common in the last three years have almost been non-existent after the unity government formed in February 2009 finally got a handle on the crisis.

Mahere said as part of the consolidation, the estimated 19,000 temporary teachers plugging vacancies left by teaching staff in the brain drain of the last decade would be offered annual contracts instead of the current per-term-renewal to promote “stability”.

He said: “There is need for sufficient teaching staff. This is part of the educational development plans.

“Temporary teachers, with effect from 2011, will now be recruited on a yearly contact to avoid inconveniences and inconsistencies.”

Labels: EDUCATION, LITERACY, STEPHEN MAHERE, ZIMBABWE

posted by MrK @ 6:30 AM