A fifth of Jamaican parents say they cannot afford to send their children to school during the academic year beginning next week, and nearly 60 per cent believe the Govern-ment should remove all education-related fees up to high school.

But perhaps more signi-ficantly, approximately half the parents who won't be able to meet the education bills do not know of Government programmes - such as PATH, a poverty alleviation programme - to help poor families with school and other expenses, an opinion poll commissioned by The Gleaner showed.

Officials taken aback

Government officials were taken aback by this finding.

"I am very surprised that people do not know about such programmes," the Junior Education Minister, Noel Monteith, said yesterday.

The Government will be spending $1.2 billion, or just over $4,000 on each child, to help defray tuition costs this fiscal year, Mr. Monteith said.

The poll, conducted by pollster Bill Johnson, was done in mid-July, utilising a sample of 1,008 people across Jamaica's 14 parishes. It has a margin of error of plus or minus three per cent.

Sixty per cent of the sample said they had school-age children and, of this group, approximately two-thirds (65 per cent) said they would be able to afford the cost of sending their children to school during this school year.

Meeting the bills

However, a substantial 20 per cent were clear that they could not meet the bills, while 14 per cent did not know if they could. Or, looked at another way, nearly a third (34 per cent) of the parents were clear they would not pay or had doubts that they would be able to.

These findings came against the backdrop of a debate in Jamaica over the cost of education, how it should be financed and what, if any, parents should pay.

Free tuition, up to university level, was introduced in the 1970s by the People's National Party (PNP) administration of the late Michael Manley. Fees at the secondary and university levels were reintroduced in the 1980s by the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), which is now in opposition.

The JLP promised to remove secondary education fees during the campaign for the 2002 general election, but the Government said instead it would phase them out.

The administration often points to its poverty-alleviation scheme Programme for Advancement through Health and Education (PATH), a component of which includes paying the fees of students who are required to meet attendance standards. However, only 185,000 people, not all of them students, are now beneficiaries of the programme which was projected to serve 185,000.

Johnson, in his survey, found that only 52 per cent of the sample knew of such programmes, although PATH or others were not specifically mentioned.

Of the 59 per cent of the people who argued for the elimination of all education-related fees, 31 were passionate that they should go, while 28 per cent voiced agreement with the concept.

Of the 38 per cent who believed that fees should remain 33 per cent generally agreed against five per cent who held strong views on the issue.