By Omar Anderson, Gleaner WriterGOVERNMENT HAS allocated $30.2 billion to education this fiscal year, a $677 million increase over last year, but the figure represents less than 10 per cent of the national budget.
The move has created a stir in the Opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), with Audley Shaw, the party's finance spokesman, castigating the Government yesterday for reneging on a bi-partisan agreement to increase the total education budget to a minimum '11 per cent this financial year'.
Some $29.5 billion was allotted to the Education Ministry for 2003/04. That figure represented just about 10.6 per cent of the total $279 billion budget.
"We are going to aggressively pursue the matter during next week's Standing Finance Committee meeting where the Opposition fully intends to hold the Finance Minister, the Minister of Education, the Prime Minister, and the entire Government accountable to this agreement," he said.
Last October the Government and Opposition struck an historic agreement on education in Parliament, which saw the Patterson administration committing to increase its budgetary allocation to the Ministry of Education from 10 to 15 per cent over the next five years.
The increase was expected to occur in increments of one per cent each year, which means that this year's increase should have been at least 11 per cent, as against the current 9.2 per cent.
According to Mr. Shaw, Finance Minister Dr. Omar Davies has 'failed' to provide the one per cent increase in the education budget, recording a clear one per cent reduction instead.
The Education Ministry this year has got $29.5 billion for recurrent expenses from which salaries, including those of the island's over 20,000 teachers, will be paid.
The capital budget for the Education Ministry for this financial year is $653 million, compared to $341 million last year.
Funding to tertiary education has been increased by more than $2 billion with the allocation for the University of the West Indies (UWI) increased from $1.6 billion in the last financial year to $4 billion.
The grant to the University of Technology (UTech) has been increased by more than $300,000 to $855 million.
