THERE ARE some very worrying statistics, published in last Friday's Gleaner, which should concentrate the minds of the Education Minister and others in the policy establishment.

First, it is bad enough that a full fifth of Jamaican parents say, according to a poll conducted on behalf of this newspaper, that they will not be able to afford the cost of keeping their children in school this academic year. That is to say, assuming that teachers are not on strike over pay, many children will not find their way to the classrooms for the term which begins this week.

But worse is the bad job that the Government has clearly done in telling people, especially those who need to know, about state assistance to help keep children in school. For, according to the same survey, nearly half - 48 per cent- of parents who can't meet the school fees do not know of schemes such as the one run by the Ministry of Education to help meet secondary-level tuition costs or the poverty-alleviation Programme for Advancement Through Health and Education (PATH).

What is surprising is that the authorities are surprised that people don't know of the programmes, or that if they know, that their awareness of how to access them is limited. The numbers should have been telling a story; the same numbers provided by Mr. Noel Monteith, the junior Minister of Education.

According to Mr. Monteith, the PATH programme, under which parents are obliged to keep children in school to maintain benefits, has 185,000 beneficiaries, over 40 per cent fewer than was projected for the programme.

If we assume that the initial projection was based on credible data and empirical analysis, it would hardly be logical that such a large proportion of the potential beneficiaries were staying away because they were bloody-minded or for some other sociological reason, like not wanting to admit to being poor.

Moreover, it would seem to us that an administration following the data would have been preparing to capture people in the safety net designed to protect such a critical area as education. After all, the Government's own recently-published Survey of Living Conditions pointed to a 50 per cent rise in poverty in the Kingston Metropolitan Region (KMR) in 2004 and overall 22 per cent decline in expenditure on education, although there is no clear correlation between reduced expenditure in this area and increased poverty. It does, however, beg the question.

We expect the Government's apologists to point to our poll finding that approximately two thirds of the parents say that they can meet their school costs. But education, particularly at the foundation level, is too vital to the future of Jamaica for a fifth, and possibly a third, to be worried that the bills are beyond them. It seems to us, therefore, that we have to place on the table again, this matter of financing this stage of education.

Perhaps we need to shift financing priorities, steering more of the resources to early childhood, primary and secondary education and ask students to pay more at the tertiary level. And we have to better utilise programmes that are to assist those who really need the help.

THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY RELECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.