Bubi Rural District Council moves to address schools' poor pass rate

• Published date: 05 March 2023
• Publication title: The Sunday News

THE poor pass rate at schools in Bubi District of Matabeleland North Province has been attributed to parents failing to play ball in educating their children through provision of adequate resources as well as timely payment of school fees to ensure the development of comfortable learning environments.

This has been buttressed by the revelation that 26 out of the 76 schools in the district are not yet registered because they do not meet the minimum infrastructure development requirements for a school. This came out of an education stakeholders meeting held on Friday at Inyathi that was attended by school heads and School Development Committee (SDC) chairpersons in the district where Bubi Rural District Council Chief Executive Officer Dr Patson Mlilo said they were going to engage traditional leaders to help them force parents to pay school fees and recoup debts owed to schools.

The meeting was a post-mortem of the poor pass rates recorded by most schools in the district that was becoming endemic.

The meeting noted that there were a number of causes to the poor pass rates, among them lack of proper infrastructure in the schools which was attributed to the reluctance by parents to pay school fees.

Most headmasters and SDC chairpersons were in unison that a good number of parents were not paying fees at all while some were not paying on time. The meeting agreed that only a handful were loyal when it came to fees payment.

The failure by parents to honour their fees payment obligation to the schools, they noted, was impacting negatively on the development of the necessary basic education infrastructure for their children leading to a poor pass rate.

'One factor that stands out like a sore finger is the reluctance by parents to pay for their children's education. It has emerged from the meeting that parents are sending children to school but do not want to pay school fees and yet they expect to see development at the school.

'You then ask yourself questions like, on whose expense do they expect the various infrastructure development at the schools to be done. Most of our schools hardly have enough classroom blocks, let alone teachers' cottages and toilets. Some are still learning in farm houses and qualified teacher retention at those schools is quite difficult if not impossible,' said Dr Mlilo.

He said as a result of the failure by most parents and guardians to prioritise the payment of fees of their children, a number of schools in the district do not meet the minimum...