Most of the government schools are in need of repairs - Radrodro

Most of the government schools are in need of repairs, renovation and maintenance, and the Ministry of Education has allocated $1.8 million for upgrading government school facilities while $1 million is set aside to upgrade government school staff quarters.

This was highlighted by the Minister for Education, Aseri Radrodro while delivering his ministerial speech this morning in Parliament, where he also said that government schools’ upgrade and maintenance is unfortunately carried out in a ad-hoc way as opposed to the periodic maintenance that used to be undertaken by the Public Works Department in the past.

He says in PWD’s, days the school infrastructure was well kept, there was a standard colour code for all government schools infrastructure because the standards maintenance plan and it is something the coalition government values and embarks to bring back so the standard of education facilities in all government schools are restored.

Radrodro says they are working in collaboration with the Ministry of Public Works and have conducted assessments of all government school facilities as government must provide a conducive learning while the procurement work is expected to start soon.

He says it is critical that all government school must offer some standard form of academic and extra curricular activities and he is encouraging Head of Schools to provide exposure to the students and not to be restricted to the same traditional sports such as Rugby, Netball, Soccer and Athletics.

The Minister further says a constant concern has been raised that the new teachers joining the profession share the same salary level as with those teachers serving more than 15 years.

He adds that because of this many raised that the salary level compared to the workload is leading many teachers to resign and move to overseas.

Meanwhile, FijiFirst MP Hem Chand says the previous government gave priority to education and introduced free education grant regardless of the location and authority of the school however the the coalition government is only focusing on the government schools and overlooking non-government schools.

Chand says there are only 13 government schools out of 900 schools in Fiji.

He says FijiFirst government had never given piriority to only government schools.