By CHUSA SICHONE –
THE Ministry of Education, Science, Vocational Training and Early Education says it cannot lift the ban on fee-paying extra lessons in schools as doing so will be to the disadvantage of underprivileged pupils.
Ministry of Education Permanent Secretary Chishimba Nkosha warned that teachers defying Government’s guidelines on the matter would face disciplinary action once caught.
Mr Nkosha said the Government decided to ban tuition in schools following the realisation that only pupils from well-to-do families were able to afford paying the extra lessons fees.
He was speaking in an interview with the Sunday Times last week.
The Ministry also noticed that some teachers were compelling pupils to settle for their tuition by deliberately not teaching all topics in the syllabus.
“We can’t lift the ban when we have seen the disadvantages of favouring some pupils from well-to-do families. What we have said is that we can only allow a situation where schools conduct free tuition so that even pupils from poor families can benefit from such arrangements,” he said.
The Government allowed schools to conduct tuitions only if they were free so that they could afford pupils equal learning opportunities while schools which wanted to conduct free extra lessons during holidays were directed to seek permission from the ministry before schools closed.
Mr Nkosha said before schools closed recently, the Catholic secretariat wrote to the ministry seeking permission to conduct tuitions during holidays, the request which has been granted.
“If there are some individual teachers who are conducting tuitions secretly, that has not been brought to our attention. We would like a situation where if there are such people who are doing things behind our backs we are alerted so that we deal with those problems.
“We have our code of ethics which we follow; disciplinary procedures have to be initiated by the supervising officers,” he said.
On the ongoing teacher recruitment exercise, Mr Nkosha said the process had not reached a point where the ministry would be involved as the exercise was decentralised but that it would come in once the short-listing was done.
Mr Nkosha said candidates were currently submitting their application forms to District Education Board Secretaries and Provincial Education Officers.