Bid to stop expensive school fees
The Education Ministry wants the new constitution to avoid promising 12 years of "free" basic education in order to stop schools from charging other fees that often end up costing parents more than the waived tuition fee.
Education Minister Wijit Srisaan said yesterday that the Education Council had sent him its recommendations for the new constitution, which he would revise before sending them to the National Legislative Assembly. Most of the content was based on the previous charter but briefer and more realistic. The Education Ministry would propose that Article 43 of the old charter - stipulating the government shall provide people an equal right to obtain 12 years of basic education with quality and at no charge - be rephrased. It should say something like the government shall allocate fair and sufficient resources to enable the arrangement of 12 years of basic education with quality and equity, he said. The old wording contained a loophole that let schools extract money from parents for "extracurricular activities", which often turned out to be ambiguous and even more expensive. The new version would force the government to find ways to support schools with sufficient resources so that they could provide quality education. Wijit said the ministry had a longstanding regulation that schools could not charge for tuition. Voluntary fund-raising from parents was acceptable as long as it did not pay for regular expenses.
|
