November 04, 2008	Tuesday	Ziqa'ad 5, 1429

KARACHI, Nov 3: Several private schools continue to fleece students and parents by charging excessive fee and pay meagre salaries to teachers and yet go unchecked as the mechanism provided under the rules for the inspection of schools is not properly followed.

Though the Sindh Private Educational Institutions (Regulation and Control) Rules-2005 envisages constitution of an inspection committee comprising at least three members – one each from the provincial education department, education group of offices of district government and civil society – it is not being implemented in the letter and spirit for the reasons best known to the registration authorities.

There are three registration authorities for private educational institutions, according to a notification issued by Sindh Education department on April 17, 2006.

The Executive District Officer (Education) is the registration authority for elementary schools and institutions from Montessori up to Class VIII in his respective district.

The director of private schools education and literacy department, Sindh, is the registration authority for the secondary schools as well as O and A level schools, excluding Grammar School and Jesus & Mary.

The education secretary is the registration authority for higher secondary schools/colleges/degree-awarding institutions having academic linkage/foreign collaborations/affiliation with any other institutions of higher learning and teachers training, Grammar School, Jesus and Mary School of ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels.

It is mandatory upon the registration authority to constitute inspection committees for carrying out detailed inspection of educational institutions at the time of their registration or renewal of the registration certificate.

After inspection, the committees are required to recommend a fee structure of the respective school to the registration authority for approval.

Such an obligatory requirement is seldom carried out or remains on paper only as in most cases such formalities are fulfilled by the officials of the registration authority themselves by using their ‘discretionary’ powers.

Insiders say that initially a registration certificate is granted to a private school for a period of three years, but neither the school nor the registration authority makes any effort to ensure that the certificate is renewed after three years.

Most violations of the Sindh Private Educational Institutions (Regulation and Control) Rules-2005 are related to the fee structure and salaries of staff, the sources point out.

Under the rules, they say, the schools are allowed to charge only a tuition fee and that too after seeking approval from the registration authority concerned. But many private schools are charging fee in other heads as well, most common being the ‘annual charges’, voluntary donations and charges for development activities.

Private schools can legally increase a tuition fee up to five per cent of the previous fee schedule while in numerous cases the annual fee increase ranges between 20 and 50 per cent and yet the authorities do not take such schools to task.

Under the rules, the minimum salary and allowances of a full-time teacher with 12 months of continuous service should not be less than four times the monthly fee of a single student in the highest class charged by the institution.

However, the sources say, it is a common practice that private schools hire teachers on a six-month contract basis to save more by depriving teachers of their two-month salaries of the vacation period.

Quoting the Federal Bureau of Statistics’ Census Report of 2005 (published in 2006) whereby the number of registered privately-run educational institutions in Sindh is stated as 11,865, sources in the education department disclose that an equal number of private educational institutions are functioning without registration.

They attribute the mushroom growth of unregistered schools to a lack of proper mechanism for their inspection at the directorate of private schools and EDOs (Education).