Search Page

The President has ordered an audit of how public primary and secondary schools have spent the billions in free learning cash released to them across three years. Free Primary Education funds were first rolled out in 2003, with each child getting Sh1,020 per year. In 2014, the Jubilee government increased FPE to Sh1,420 to cater for an estimated enrolment of about 10 million children in about 23,000 public primary schools. Annually this costs Sh14 billion.

Seoul's education authority is conducting an intensive crackdown on corrupt practices in the hiring of teachers at private elementary, middle and high schools. Officials at the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education (SMOE) said Monday that they are collecting tips amid persistent rumors of bribery during the hiring process. In this process, it is said that close ties with school foundation officials, or even bribes, often become the decisive factor in landing a job.

The Chairman of Executive Trainers Limited (ETL), and an expert in higher education-related issues, has called on the Federal Government to take its anti-corruption campaign to campuses of the institution of higher learning in the country. At a media briefing in Lagos, he expressed serious concerns at the level of decay in the nation's tertiary institutions, stressing that as facilities where future Nigerian leaders were trained, there was need for sanity in the sector.

In one week at the end of 2015, five presidents or senior vice-presidents of four of Beijing’s most prestigious universities were punished or penalised for violating laws and Communist Party regulations on embezzlement and corruption. In 2015, a total of 52 members of senior management at universities and scholars were reprimanded on similar charges by the Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, or CCDI, as part of an anti-corruption campaign in universities that started in 2013.

The United Kingdom is suffering a cheating epidemic fuelled by the influx of international students, with almost 50,000 students at British universities caught cheating in the past three years, according to an investigation by The Times newspaper based on responses to more than 100 freedom of information requests. The investigation found that students from outside of the European Union were more than four times as likely to cheat in exams and coursework.

Starting this year, the Bihar government will transfer the benefits of education schemes such as scholarships and school uniforms, as well as social welfare schemes such as old age and widow pensions, directly to the beneficiaries to reduce red tape and the possibility of mid-level officials pocketing part of the benefits. For schools, the government order brings the challenge of opening up to 25 million bank accounts for students from 69,500 primary and middle schools and 4,500 secondary and higher secondary schools.

Cases of scientific malpractice in Brazil increased significantly between 2009 and 2012, according to a study looking at article retraction in scientific journals. The paper looked at retracted research articles in two major Latin American and Caribbean databases. Out of 2,000 articles from around the world published in the databases between 2009 and 2014, 31 were later pulled back, including 25 articles from Brazil. The study, published in Science and Engineering Ethics, says that this could threaten the country’s growing popularity as a research partner.

The Sindh education department has decided to recover the funds disbursed in salaries to ghost teachers using its biometric attendance system. Sindh education secretary boasted that Sindh is the only province in the country to have biometric attendance in the education department.

Although there has been an enormous expansion in higher education in India over the past 30 years there is still a huge problem around quality. In 2013 the Indian government launched a new higher education improvement programme. Australian universities can help by: training staff, rooting out corruption, sharing knowledge on access, and establishing research partnerships.