Dr JIMMY HARMON
Government funding of some seventy non-fee paying private secondary schools dates back to 1977 when secondary education became free. In 1974, the Ramphul Report recommends the setting up of the Private Secondary Schools Authority (PSSA) and asks for the classification of schools into ‘state’ and ‘private’. In 2016, amendments were made to the PSSA Act and it became PSEA (Private Secondary Education). The current bone of contention between the private colleges and the PSEA is the mechanism of the New Grant Formula 2020-2023 for the calculation and disbursement of funds.
On 7th December 2021, the Leader of the Opposition (Mr X. L. Duval) (by Private Notice) asked the Vice-Prime Minister, Minister of Education, Tertiary Education, Science and Technology at the National Assembly “whether, in regard to the correspondence dated 15 October 2021 addressed by the Director of the Private Secondary Education Authority (PSEA) to managers of grant aided private secondary schools, she can state if she has been made aware thereof and if she has taken note of the press communiqué dated 29 October 2021 from the Service Diocésain de l’Education Catholique and of the press conference of the Federation of Unions of Managers of Private Secondary Schools held on 08 November 2021 in relation thereto and, if so, indicate the actions she has taken to date regarding same, if any’’. The reply to this PNQ has three levels.
The surface level is about the use of public funds and the grant aided system of private schools in Mauritius. The main line of argument of the Minister in favour of the PSEA reads as follows: ‘‘Now, when we have a report from the Audit Office, when we have a report from the ICAC, do you want me to sit back and say: okay, let things go as it has been going on for years? No, we have got to redress, Mr Speaker, Sir’’ (Hansard, 7th December 2021, p.21). The reaction of the Leader of the Opposition is worth mentioning: ‘She does not understand; this is why this mess. This is a horrible mess, Mr Speaker, Sir. Hon. Minister, this is what is said in the PSEA – “Any unutilised amount will be offset against the disbursement of the following quarter.” Meaning what? That if you do not spend today, you get a reduction next time. Otherwise, they do not know how to write English” (p.19). The ‘mess’ referred to by the Leader of the Opposition leads to our second level. In fact, the whole argumentation of the Minister calls for a profound discussion by policy-makers about the role of the PSEA and its effectiveness as a regulatory body. The third level goes beyond the shallow levels. Basically, what is at stake now is the ethics of regulatory governance of the PSEA. Ethics is understood here as the moral principles that govern the activities of the regulatory body. Regulatory Governance is defined as policies, tools, processes, and institutions that are primarily concerned with developing, implementing, administering, enforcing rules and decisions for a sector. It encompasses efficacy, legal accountability, and inclusion.
The Hansard
Indeed, the Hansard of 7th December 2021 is of great interest. Considered as ‘text data’, parliamentary and legislative debate transcripts provide access to information concerning the opinions, positions, and policy preferences of elected politicians. They usually attract attention from researchers from a wide variety of backgrounds, from political and social sciences. The debate transcripts help to understand what elected representatives at all levels of governance have to say about matters of importance. The US Congress, UK parliament, EU parliament, German Bundestag, Canadian parliament and the Irish Dáil are by far the most popular legislature analysis. ‘Sentiment analysis’ is a general umbrella term for the research methodology whose task is the extraction of information relating to speakers’ opinions and expressed positions. The sentiment analysis helps to identify the ‘sentiment polarity classification’ around words, tone and recurrences which are for the more specific, binary or ternary classification task. In this regard, the reply to the PNQ of 7th December 2021 stands on 17 pages in the Hansard. There have been 118 interventions. The counting stands as follows: namely Leader of Opposition =35; Minister= 35; Speaker = 40; one Honourable Member = 8 (name not mentioned but reported for nagging repeated remarks made in Kreol language).
Ethics & Best Practice Regulatory Governance
On 28 October 2021, the Corporate Governance Scorecard for Mauritius, a corporate governance rating system designed to raise the standards of corporate governance practices in Mauritius was launched. Much research and studies have been undertaken on measuring Corporate Governance and the Scorecard uses global principles and internationally recognized good practices such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Principles of Corporate Governance. The underlying principle of the Governance scorecard is good governance goes beyond ‘check-the-box approaches’. It has to take into account the context and applicability of any check and control measure. On this matter, it can be said that the PSEA functioning on the public service instructions model through circular letters is far from the standard corporate governance practices. The table in this paper shows the regulatory governance model. It illustrates how ‘Accountability of operators’ to the ‘Authority’ requires communication with consensus between the operators and the regulatory body. We can also see the boundaries of each actor touch each other in the regulatory model. The circle of the policy-makers falls into the bigger circle of the citizens. The ‘OECD Best Practice for Regulatory Policy: The Governance of Regulators’ spells out the ethics and best practice and states that regulators are accountable to three groups of stakeholders: i) ministers and the legislature; ii) regulated entities; iii) the public. Hence, the crux of the matter is the ethics of the PSEA as a regulatory body and the dire need for dialogue and consensus.
References
Abercrombie, G., and Batista-Navarro, R. T. 2018. Identifying opinion-topics and polarity of parliamentary debate motions. In WASSA, 280–285.
OECD Best Practice for Regulatory Policy: The Governance of Regulators. https://www.oecd.org/gov/regulatory-policy/the-governance-of-regulators