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National law and policies on fee or for free – Albania

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.

<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 />Albania epitomizes problems of transition from a centrally planned to a market economy through a process of impoverishment which led it onto the list of the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC). Education could not have remained unaffected by that process of impoverishment. As governmental budgetary allocations to education diminished, charges upon families increased to make up the shortfall. UNICEF reported in 2000 that “in the elementary system, the main cause of dropout and decrease in the number of enrollments was inability to afford the required school expenses”. The World Bank diagnosed in 2001 an increased “private coverage of educational costs,” at the time when widespread impoverishment reduced the families’ ability to finance the education of their children. Furthermore, the global design of education as an independent sector translated nationally into a disjointed vision of the future. Education was in theory supposed to lead to poverty reduction but in practice the lack of employment prospects after school diminished the motivation to pay for schooling for those who could afford to do so. The unemployment rate by many estimates exceeded 40% in 2005.<?xml:namespace prefix = o /> 

During the first decade of Albania’s transition, international attention focused on consecutive mass exoduses which epitomized problems within the country. International attention focused on halting emigration rather than tackling its causes. After the turn of the millennium, international priorities have remained externally oriented, politically and militarily looking towards Albania’s role in supporting global recipes for the future of Kosovo. On the human rights agenda, trafficking in people has been prioritized and, again, its causes within Albania have remained largely un-addressed.

 The pre-transition decades of all-encompassing, free and compulsory education still bear fruit because going to school became a habit and enrolment statistics remain good. For the school year 2002-2003, the enrolment rate in primary school was reported by the government at 94%  and by the OECD at 90%. School attendance figures are fragmentary but indicate that some 11% of children in the compulsory school-age do not attend school. There may be many more who are not recorded in the official statistics.

 Conflicting global strategies are reflected in Albania in colliding laws. Because children are supposed to be at school, the minimum age of employment was set at the school-leaving age. Children who leave school earlier, most often because they cannot afford its cost and have to work, are legally not allowed to work because they are supposed to attend school. The law forces them to work illegally:

 One of the difficulties is the Labour Code’s specification of the legal employment age at 16. According to the Law on Pre-university Education, mandatory education ends at 14 years of age. Yet the actual legislation does not permit children of 14-15, who no longer go to school, to work. As a matter of fact, many children of this age work illegally

 This confusion exemplifies conflicting international influences on the national design of education. The pressure to adjust national legislation to conform to international human rights standards has generated laws which formally conform to minimal global standards. Thus, children should be at school until the age of 16 and should not work earlier. The assumption underpinning these global standards, that the government will ensure that all school age children are at school, is not congruent with Albanian reality. This reality does not inform policy-making because it is fragmentated into ‘sectors’. Education is separated from child labour both globally and domestically, employment-creation for the young is separated from the elimination of child labour. Global policies on the public finance necessary to translate these varied prescriptions into governmental practice are a decisive but separate ‘sector.’

 Albania’s Constitution guarantees the right of all citizens to education and equal access to all levels of education. This is premised on education being fully financed from the state budget. The budgetary allocations to education are much too small, however. Only 2.4% of GDP is allocated to education and this cannot suffice for such a large proportion of school children in Albania’s young population. The budgetary allocations to education would have to be at least trebled to meet its actual costs. 

In its reports under international human rights treaties, the government has highlighted the overcrowding in urban schools adding that “only 65 per cent of schools are in acceptable condition”. Inadequate budgetary allocations are informally supplemented by parental payments and, when parents are too poor to afford them, children have to work. In consequence, primary education has gradually become de-universalized.