HOW TO ENSURE “AFFORDABLE” SCHOOL FEES?

Last week parliament tasked the education ministry with outlining punitive measures for schools that charge prohibitive fees.

This is

a perennial lament that pops up around the first term, when parents coming out of the merry making of the festive season, “suddenly” realise school fees are “too expensive”.

The representatives of the people jump on the sentiment and criticise the government in general and the education ministry, in particular for the high fees schools are charging.

This time they have gone a step further and demanded that the education ministry punish schools, which charge exorbitant fees.

You never know whether to laugh or cry in these situations.

There are a number of issues here, not least of all is how do you  determine what are exorbitant fees.

A man who was used to driving free of charge on Entebbe road may think the sh5000 a trip on Entebbe expressway is exorbitant; A man who is used to drinking a beer at his local Kafunda at sh3000 may scream bloody murder when he goes to one of our higher establishments and they charge him sh10,000 for beer; A man used to paying sh1,000 in a taxi may have some uncharitable words to say when the Uber driver charges him sh15,000 for the same trip into town.

Even more fundamentally, the MPs were not calling for sanctions on government schools but on private schools, which government ideally should have no business setting caps on what they charge as fees.

"Putting a cap on fees will disincentivise investment in the sector and lead to the very thing MPs are complaining about – exorbitant fees...

About 10 million children are enrolled in primary and secondary schools around the country. In Kampala 84 percent of them are enrolled in private institutions. In the countryside this falls away considerably depending on the earning power of the population.

If parliament wants to sustainably lower school fees they need to take a long hard look at that ratio. That number screams for more investment by government in the sector.  

With the power to appropriate budgets, MPs should be talking about increasing the funding to the sector to build, man and equip more schools as a way to bring fees down.

It’s a simple demand and supply equation. The more government schools there are of credible quality the less the gap for the private schools to fill in.

In Sweden where government provides free education for every child of school going age,  private schools account for less than a fifth of all enrolment. 

Sweden has not banned private schools, but the businessmen themselves realise there is little space to make money in that education system. That is how to keep fees low...

You can bet that those private schools in Sweden would laugh at the fees our most exorbitant private schools charge. Because to make a case for people choosing them to public schools, certain things like swimming pools, computer labs, fullfledged sports  programs  among other things would be standard in a Swedish private school, which is not the case here.

Going down their current path of righteous indignation as earlier stated, will lead to the high fees they are trying to fight, as businessmen opt out of the sector and with government unable to fill the gap,  demand will outstrip demand and the MPs worst nightmare will come true.

In the early 2000s when inflation in Zimbabwe was going through the roof – prices were doubling every day at one point, then President Robert Mugabe decreed that prices should be held steady by businessmen so people can afford at least food.

The businessmen’s reaction was to take goods off the shelf and store them away in the back, giving rise to a black market that sent inflation so high the Zimbabwe dollar is not worth the paper it is printed on.

A similar thing would happen to our education system. School owners would declare an official fees structure but insist parents pay a lot more under the table to gain admission.

At least now the fees structure is there for all to see, in the aforementioned scenario you could very well have different fees for every kid in the school because there would be no way to know the fees structure.  

"The MPs are right to call for more reasonable fees. They have the power to lower fees across the sector but not in the way they are going about it...

They would lower school fees by upping the education budget to build, equip and man more schools, ensure standards are enforced, teachers are trained and remunerated properly in public schools.