Support for school fees’ extension

Press, 13 August 1980, Page 2

Support for school fees’ extension

PA Auckland Secondary schools might need to have their fee=chargirg powers extended if they were to keep up with modern educational "standards, said the national president of the Secondary School Boards’ Association (Mr G. Bernard) in Auckland yesterday. Mr . Bernard was commenting on assertions by the Education Department that some secondary schools were charging pupils illegal

fees to supplement Government funds and pay for teaching materials such as cyclostyled texts. The department had sent circulars to school boards reminding them of the legal rights of parents, pupils, and controlling authorities when charging donations, activity fees, and other payments.

Mr Bernard said he would raise the matter with the department and his national executive, to see whether the rights of boards to charge fees should be extended or updated. At present, boards may charge activity fees, not provided for under the general purposes grant, to pay for sports’ equipment, school magazines and computers. Fees are also charged for materials used in practical classes such as woodwork, cooking, or art.

Mr Bernard said that if schools were charging illegal fees, believed to range from 50c to $9 a subject, they might have real cause to do so. “We are responsible bodies and are subject to the same regulations as any local authority. “It may be time that our fee-charging powers are extended to cover other sub-

jects, such as mathematics, which are changing rapidly because of advanced computer technology.”

Mr ’Bernard said that schools could no longer rely on the same textbooks year after year, but had to supplement their teaching material and continually update it to keep pace with standards. “However, schools must realise that many of the sophisticated tools such as computers cannot be used by the whole school.”

He said that boards were required to advertise their fees in their prospectus and had the right to sue parents if they refused to pay without a lawful excuse. Fees charged at present ranged from about $l5 to $25 a year. “Parents must realise that education is no longer free — $9 a term is not a great deal of money,” Mr Bernard said. The director of school supervision (Mr P. J. Gulliford) said yesterday that the problem was partly a result of an increasing tendency for schools to produce their own material rather than to use textbooks, which fell under the free textbooks regulations.