A Million Children Still Unable to Study 05-01-2004   Over a million Mozambican children of school age will be unable to attend primary school in 2004 for sheer lack of space in the classrooms.

Over a million Mozambican children of school age will be unable to attend primary school in 2004 for sheer lack of space in the classrooms.

According to Virgilio Juvane, the National Director of Planning in the Education Ministry, it is mainly the shortage of schools and of teachers that leads to this situation. The million children in question are aged between six and 13 and should, in principle, be studying in first and second level primary education (grades one to seven).

Juvane told AIM that the problem can only be overcome gradually by expanding the school network and training more teachers. Complicating matters is the "accumulated deficit of children who did not enter school in previous years, either for lack of space or because their parents did not enrol them in time". In principle children should be enrolled in first grade when they are six years old: but because of the problems of the past, first grade also includes many children who are considerably older than six.

Despite all the difficulties, many more children will be studying this year than in 2003. Thanks to the building of new schools last year, in 2004 the Ministry expects to enrol 731,000 children in first grade (which compares with the 685,000 places available last year).

"To put a million more children into the education system, operating two shifts in the schools, we need at least 10,000 more classrooms", he said. And at the current pace this would take about ten years. However, Juvane was optimistic that the pace of building new schools will speed up as from this year. A new construction project, if properly implemented, could lead to the building of 6,000 classrooms a year.

Many more teachers must also be trained. The current teacher/pupil ratio in primary schools is one to 64. The Ministry wants to bring this down to 50 pupils per teacher. But this requires money, not least to pay the teachers' wages, and the Mozambican government is under pressure from the IMF to cut back its wages bill. A further major problem for the Mozambican education system is that the number of places available declines dramatically the higher up one goes. The vast majority of pupils are concentrated in the first five grades. This year there are only 197,000 places available in grade six, and just 56,000 in grade eight, the start of secondary education. In grade 11, there are a mere 11,000 places.

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