Parents Raise Alarm Over Extra Levies Other Than School Fees

Parents Raise Alarm Over Extra Levies Other Than School Fees

Parents have expressed concerns over extra expenses they are supposed to pay besides school fees which has made the cost of Education go high.

Principal Secretary for Early Learning and Basic Education, Dr Julius Jwan last week expressed concern that schools send home children whose parents or guardians have not paid ‘motivation fees.’

Motivation fee is money parents or guardians pay for teaching outside normal school timetable. The Basic Education Regulations, 2015, prescribes the classroom hours for all public and private day primary and secondary schools to be from 8am to 3.30pm. Classroom hour means 40 minutes (for secondary schools and 35 minutes for primary schools) of any one lesson on the timetable.

The hours outside the designated teaching hours from 8am to 3.30pm on weekdays, weekends, including school holidays, are critical in the growth and development of the children.

Formal education is not the only good or asset they need when they come of age. There are many other things of an informal educational nature that are critical to the growth and development of the child.

The cumulative number of hours in the school calendar is sufficient to optimally deliver curriculum content.

Secondly, the teacher or classroom hours are not the only source of learning or education available to the learner.

Third, learners need sufficient breaks from classroom hours to either undertake their own education through study of course books and other supplementary materials and also to simply relax.

The thrust of the school hours that the Basic Education Regulations, 2015, is that schools should release students to pursue co-curricular and extra-curricular activities that expand their cognitive, emotional and psychomotor lives. It also creates time to build relationships among their peers, children older than them and adults. Crucially, it also enables learners to have time to be alone – to read and reflect.

Unbroken instruction of learners which motivation fee has made possible has isolated children from each other and from the adult world.

Our national education policy, curricular and standards has taken all this thinking into account in designing the school calendar, and instructional time.

Making learners study for incredibly long hours violates the law and the conventions society about how children should be nurtured into adulthood. It is a motivation fee which underwrite teaching outside the designated classroom hours. It is a motivation fee that finances teaching outside the designated teaching hours from 8am to 3.30pm on weekdays, weekends, including public holidays which fall on weekdays.

In sum, boarding schools teach about 10 hours per day – four hours beyond the stipulated six hours during the weekdays and about four hours during Saturdays, and public holidays – in the event they fall on weekdays.

The motivation fee parents pay is the one used to pay teachers for ‘extra time’ spent outside the official six hours, to teach the “daily exhausted” students. Motivation fee is a superfluous charge on parents. Wholly without logic and sense.