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A study into rural and ungraded schools, conducted by the Sandzh research center and independent experts and commissioned by Soros Foundation-Kazakhstan, has shown that education for rural children costs to the state, and, therefore, taxpayers, three-and-a-half times more expensive than for urban children. The study has been conducted under the Access to Quality Education: Opportunities and Restrictions for Children at Rural Schools in the Republic of Kazakhstan project.

“Nevertheless, rural schools should be preserved. Schoolchildren should have access to education all over the country, including in remote sparsely-populated areas,” says Zhanibek Khassan, officer of Soros-Foundation-Kazakhstan’s Budget Transparency and Public Accountability program. “The matter is how efficiently these significant funds are spent in villages. In order to create a competitive secondary education system in Kazakhstan, education budget should be formed and spent purposefully and it should be transparent for parents, teachers and the entire population.”

The report, presented by Soros Foundation-Kazakhstan at a news conference in Almaty, specifies another figure – 11 billion tenge, or 4% of the spending on secondary education: this is what rural teachers spend on doing their jobs from their own pockets. Since schools are underfunded, they have to fill the gap from their own money in order to ensure a quality education process in schools. In ungraded schools where the professionalism of teachers is low, teachers’ costs are high – they total 6.3 billion tenge in major rural schools. “Rural schools, especially ungraded ones, experience systematic problems which stem from the lack of budget transparency and the vagueness of mechanisms of budget formation for the population,” Zhanibek Khassan says. “None of school directors could explain how the budget of their schools was calculated and allocated. Rural school budgets are not specialized and do not cover all the necessary costs. Many problems can be solved if rural school budgets are distributed more transparently and formed locally, involving parents and teachers. The lack of transparency in the education system causes the lack of budget funds,” Zhanibek Khassan stresses.

“The situation is also complicated by the fact that young specialists are drained away to the towns while the current teaching staff in place are ageing,” says Zhanar Dzhandosova, head of the Sandzh research center. “The lengths of service of 42% of rural and ungraded school teachers range between 20 and 30 years and only 17% of them have been teaching for less than 10 years. The study has shown that rural teachers are paid 30,000 tenge a month on average, but a significant part of teachers’ work is not paid because they have to deal with irrelevant activities, such as preparing and conducting celebrations on national holidays, inspecting households and conducting censuses and even livestock censuses. In total, the amount of money that is not paid to each rural schoolteacher is estimated at 62,500 tenge a year.”

The expert explains that this sum also includes expenses on everyday needs, such as fixing water pipes, cleaning blocked sewage pipes and replacing taps, waste pipes, broken sinks and locks. “The government allocates a paltry amount of money for these purposes, while school is a living organism with its everyday problems which should be solved immediately. However, centralized funding is sluggish and this has been stressed by almost all rural school directors polled,” says Zhanar Dzhandosova.

The results of the study will be sent to the Education and Science Ministry of Kazakhstan and local education departments.