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schools have a fair way to go before they reach the standards parents expect.
The deficiencies are not that hard to make up. The sort of problems facing our schools are the sort that can be solved by throwing money at them. Unfortunately, there is not enough money to do everything at once.
For a start, the Government cannot solve the problems. Although the Ministry of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture has, at almost US$470 million, easily the largest budget in the Government, almost all of that money has to go on paying the barely adequate salaries teachers receive.
There is just $4,5 million left over this year to give schools as grants to buy books, teaching materials, and even chalk and paint for the walls. That is a bigger budget than some ministries get for everything they do, but when it is divided among the 3 million children in our schools it comes to just 50c a term apiece.
The ministry has not been sitting back. Every donor agency even remotely connected with education, from Unicef downwards, has been approached for help. The ministry’s plight and professionalism have both been recognised and so help has come.
Every primary school child now has the complete set of four textbooks they need for the basic core curriculum, a tremendous achievement. The ministry and its partners are now well advanced in their plans to do the same for secondary pupils with the first textbooks being distributed from the end of this year.
We presume that this aid is seen as an emergency line of help. We will no doubt be expected to provide replacements and keep stocks up to scratch ourselves. But those millions of dollars that have been spent and are being spent have been a lifesaver.
President Mugabe has spearheaded a programme to get computers into the poorest schools, but again it is likely that replacements will have to be funded by others. But that still leaves a lot that must be done. Laboratories need equipment, libraries need books, children need exercise books and pens, many schools have to catch up on more than a decade of neglected maintenance. And teachers need to be paid incentives, in cash or in kind.
Despite the recent and welcome rise in teachers’ salaries these have now just reached survival levels. If we wish to continue to retain our best teachers and attract qualified newcomers into the profession we need to do more than just pay survival salaries. The ministry is still short of qualified staff and some rural schools are almost totally reliant on temporary staff.
When we switched currencies in 2009 and finally saw the true extent of the economic devastation, everyone took a deep breadth and made sacrifices.
Parents started raising levies, and regardless of where they lived they all paid significant proportions of their income to ensuring that their children’s schools could stay open and that teachers came to work.
Most of the funds raised at the beginning went on supplementing teachers’ pay, the so-called incentives. This was obviously the top priority unless the school buildings were actually falling down since a good teacher can teach in a shed if all else fails, but no one can learn in even the most wonderful building with walls coated in books unless there are teachers.
Now many school development associations want to tackle other areas of their school budget, repairing leaking roofs and building extra classrooms, ensuring that teachers have at least the basic equipment they need, and ensuring that children have what they require.
Some have cut back on the incentives to teachers to find these extra funds. Most teachers are still better off than they were before the salary increases, since the cuts in incentives rarely are so deep as to match the rise in pay, but they are getting less than they hoped. There have been strikes as a result, unfortunately so in our opinion.
While there are parents who like to freeload, most still are ready to pay levies that chew up quite a bit of their salaries. It is not unusual to find teachers earn more than the parents of the children they teach.
So it is difficult to raise levies much further. And money must be found for these other things now. The temporary cessation of maintenance, of book-buying and the like cannot become permanent otherwise teachers will have no classrooms and nothing to teach with.
So we appreciate the dilemma facing most parents.
What has to be accepted, in light of the Government’s inability to fund almost anything beyond basic salaries for teachers, is a continued willingness of parents to pay. The days of free education, or almost free education, are over. And not just in Zimbabwe. Our neighbours are also reintroducing or raising fees.
So any school development association wanting to reduce levies, whatever they are called, is totally in the wrong. In fact, parent bodies will have to think very seriously about how far they raise them as salaries generally rise since there is so much that must be done.
Even if the Government scrapes up a little more money, to increase the grants beyond 50c a child a term, it will have to send that little extra to the most needy schools, those in the poorest rural areas where parents have almost nothing.
Communities where most parents can find some money will have to largely cope on their own.
That said, teachers have to recognise that as their basic salaries rise the need for incentives must gradually fall away. We stress the word “gradually” but in the end teachers unions themselves have noted that the huge differences in incentives between what teachers in middle-class suburbs get compared to teachers in poor rural schools is damaging.
Perhaps some school development associations are cutting incentives too fast, and perhaps some are even trying to cut levies. They must face facts as well.
It is going to take time to bring all schools back to the standards Zimbaweans expect. We hope that in all schools parents and teachers can come to an agreement on the best way of doing this.