Legislación Comparada

As observed in chapter 3.5.2.2, the role in the government basic school that is expected of parents/guardians and wider community members has now been extended to some aspects of school management. In particular, active participation is expected in three key areas: (1) development of the school Annual Work Plan and Budget (AWPB); (2) management and monitoring of the school grant; and (3) monitoring of teaching and learning. This section investigates the extent to which parental and community participation in these areas are being realised.

6.4.1 PARTICIPATION IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SCHOOL AWPB

In practice, little evidence was found that parents and the community played any part in the processes of developing the AWPB through their representatives in the PTA at any of the schools under study. No parent reported that he or she was aware of any newly assigned roles in school planning. Moreover, the guidebook that defined the new role of the PTA in school planning had not been provided to any of the schools under study, let alone to parents or the wider community. Furthermore, when a few parents mentioned that they participated in school „planning‟, their involvement usually transpired to be restricted to the development of

school infrastructure (Interview-C/P10; M/P2; M/P7). Other than in this area, the general view among them appeared to be that it was the responsibility of the trained experts to plan school activities.

Some teachers also firmly believed that school planning was the domain of the professionals, while parental and community involvement in „planning‟ should be limited to construction and renovation. There were also some teachers who were of the opinion that parents and other community members had limited capacity in terms of administrative skills and pedagogical knowledge, which inhibited them from participating in academic planning. For example, the head teacher at Chulu remarked:

School planning is the job of teachers, not that of the PTA. We were trained so we draw up the plan and budget according to government instructions. The community has nothing to do with the school plan because they do not know education. We know how to educate their children. The community does not know the importance of textbooks. They are only concerned with infrastructure, so the PTA and community only get involved in community interests such as school projects, changing the shape and appearance of the school (Interview-C/H).

Thus, they believed that it should be left them, as they knew best what pupils needed and how the school should be run; and both parents/the community and teachers generally believed that school planning was not the domain of the former.

In spite of the firm belief on the part of the teachers that school planning was their professional responsibility, little evidence was found that they developed the AWPB each year as policy directed. Mutande did not draw up an AWPB until 2008, while both Chulu and Lukasi stopped returning the AWPB in 2006. Interviews with head teachers revealed serious disincentives for schools to develop their AWPBs.

First, submission of the AWPB was not a prerequisite for the disbursement of the school grant, although the latter was intended to be used for the implementation of the school AWPB. Rather, the allocation of the school grant was based on the distribution of the total amount that had been budgeted for at central level, across provinces, districts and finally to the schools by enrolment, size of catchment area and gender parity criteria. Second, while the implementation of the school AWPB should have been financed by the school grant, the extent of the latter had diminished in recent years until it reached a level that was grossly insufficient to run the school. Teachers claimed that neither the amount nor the timing of the receipt of the grant could be predicted (see table 6-1). Thus, while each school was asked to return an AWPB, it was not informed about the progress of the plan after submission, how much would be received, or on which date. The head teacher in Lukasi put it thus:

All what we did is we just submitted [the AWPB]. We haven‟t heard from the district. That is what discouraged us [from developing the AWPB] (Interview-L/H).

At the time of the fieldwork, two different grant disbursement systems were simultaneously in operation. The grant from the government‟s domestic resources should have been disbursed to each school monthly, while the grant from the donors‟ so-called „sector pool‟ was disbursed quarterly.37 However, the head teachers and school accountants revealed that none of the schools under study had received the monthly state grant. At the same time, the quarterly donors‟ grant often did not arrive until the end of the quarter or, on occasion, much later. For example, the grant for the fourth quarter of 2007 only arrived at the end of the first quarter of 2008 at all three schools, and then the amount they received was far from adequate for efficient school management.

37 _{The grant from the external development partners‟ „sector pool‟ was further divided into „grants to basic} schools‟ and „grants for free basic education,‟ with the former being paid to the school itself and the latter distributed to the DEB, which procured materials such as stationery on behalf of the schools (World Bank 2006).