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National law and policies on fee or for free – Philippines

It matters if the state provides education for free or charges fees. Every state in the world has signed up to at least one international treaty obliging it to making primary education free and compulsory, and secondary education progressively so. But education cannot be compulsory if it is not also free and this contradiction is too often ignored. Furthermore, what does free actually mean in a world with numerous overt and hidden costs, to learners, parents, local communities? In a 2006 survey by Katarina Tomasevski education was found not to be genuinely free in the vast majority of countries in the world. The quote below on your country (if information was available) is from this very important survey.

 

The national laws and policies are the applications of the constitution, yet may actually be more advanced than this, as they are generally redrawn or updated more frequently than constitutions are. Laws are made by the government, the parliamentarians, and the bureaucrats, often in consultation with civil society. However, this also leaves them open to vulnerability and retrogression as they can become instruments of short-term politics and priorities. Laws and policies are open to change and influence through the routes of the democratic process and civil society campaigns. And where possible their violations should be challenged, either through the courts or through judicial review.

 

The state is the central actor in any claim to the right to education: it is the prime duty-bearer and the prime implementer; it is the guarantor; and it is the state´s signature vis-à-vis the international norms and standards which binds it to respect, protect and fulfil the right to education. The state must therefore be judged or challenged on its central text on the right to education, whether this be the constitution, the laws or the policies.

The Constitution of the Philippines obliges the government to ensure that both primary and lower secondary education are free but this has not been translated into governmental policy or into reality. The Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) noted in 2005 that primary education was not universalized because it was not available throughout the country. It acknowledged difficulties in ensuring schooling for children dispersed among 7,000 islands but emphasised that education was not universalized because it was not made free. Families bear the cost of “meals, transportation, school uniforms and supplies” and in many schools no enrolment and tuition charges are also levied. An important reason for transferring so much of the cost of education to the family budget is "a chronic budget deficit caused by spiralling demands on an unreformed and hopelessly inadequate revenue base".

An NGO ‘School Report’ has faulted the Philippines for failing to eliminate ‘user fees’ (in the language of the World Bank), which impede universalization of education.

 Internal problems are not the only cause of the government’s inability to ensure free and compulsory education for all children. Conflicts in the allocation of limited resources between debt repayment and education have led to human rights litigation. A group of senators challenged in 1991 the constitutionality of the budgetary allocation of P86 billion for debt servicing which compared to P27 billion for education. The 1986 Constitution of the Philippines obligates the government to assign the highest budgetary priority to education. It obliges the state to provide free public education in the elementary and high school levels and to “assign the highest budgetary priority to education.” The issue to be decided was whether debt servicing, exceeding three times the budgetary allocation for education, was unconstitutional. The Court has found that education obtained the largest allocation amongst all the government departments, as the Constitution required, while debt servicing was necessary for the creditworthiness of the country and, thus, the survival of its economy.

 The economy has survived thus far but the government’s inability to distribute the costs of that survival fairly in the population has encountered many challenges. The Philippine Commission on Human Rights has defined disadvantaged sectors as ‘women, children, youth, prisoners/detainees, urban poor, indigenous people, elderly, Muslims, persons with disabilities, internally displaced persons, informal labour, private labour, migrant workers, rural workers and public sector’. The inclusion of the whole public sector amongst the disadvantaged epitomizes the model chosen to ensure the survival of the economy. This includes teachers, whose inadequate salaries are a bottleneck for improving both outreach and quality of education.

 There is no governmental policy to ensure free primary education. Charges for enrolment and tuition, those for uniforms, shoes, supplies, and transport, and the cost of textbooks place education beyond the reach of most of these disadvantaged sectors. An additional obstacle is the lack of birth registration. Children without it exist neither legally nor statistically. Birth registration is not free of charge, adding yes another financial barrier for the poor. That financial obstacle is compounded by charges levied in public school, which should be but is not free.