By removing school fees, the Government has placed an additional one million children in school.
This was the message from Prime Minister Peter O’Neill during the ‘2017 Prime Minister’s Back-to-Business Breakfast’ last week.
He said they achieved this by investing over K3.5 billion in direct funding to schools through the Tuition Fee Free education program.
“Today, we have two million children in school – close to half of them are girls,” said the PM.
“We know there have been problems in getting so many children into school in a short period of time.
“This has meant more children are in each class, and student to teacher ratios have increased.
“But these inconveniences are very temporary.
“We are building more classrooms, and more teachers are being educated through our teacher training colleges throughout the country.
“We have trained and assigned an additional 4,711 primary school teachers and 2,144 secondary school teachers.”
O’Neill stated that over the past five years, his Government has also invested substantial funding in areas of higher level education.
“We have provided direct funding to our universities, but in facilities such as nursing colleges, and in technical training colleges.
“Our emphasis moving forward is on improving quality and expanding higher level institution capacity.
“The outcome of our free education policy is that we will have a more capable workforce and healthier communities.”
Thanks to the TFF, children in our communities will be able to make better informed decisions with their families, including in areas such as family planning, said the PM.