KARACHI, Aug 18: There are as many as 7,000 unregistered private schools operating in the city. Most of these schools are established on a purely commercial basis without fulfilling the standard requirements of running a school, it is learnt.
According to official sources, apart from these unregistered schools, there are around 9,000 private schools in the city duly registered with the relevant authorities.
Apart from the mushroom growth of unregistered private schools, the trend of establishing schools in the residential areas also continues unchecked causing innumerable problems to the residents of those areas where these schools are functioning.
According to the officials of the Sindh education department’s directorate of Registration and Inspection of Private Institutions (DR&IPI), there are in all 11,865 registered private schools throughout the province and of them 73 per cent are situated in Karachi, 12 per cent in Hyderabad while the remaining are located in other parts of the province.
There are two different organisations which have been assigned the task of registering private schools i.e. the provincial government’s education department’s directorate of registration and inspection of private institutions (DR&IPIs) and the offices of the executive district officers (EDOs). All private schools starting from Montessori to the elementary level are registered with the offices of EDOs while all the schools up to Matric, O’ Level and degree levels are registered with the DR&IPI.
When the provincial director of registration and inspection of private institutions, Mansoob Hussain Siddiqui, was asked about the measures being taken by the government to check the mushroom growth of unregistered private schools, he said that the directorate’s inspection teams, which would be visiting private schools from Aug 19 to check as to whether they were charging the approved tuition and admission fees from its students, would also ensure that the managements of such schools had got their schools registered with the directorate.
He said that it had been a common practice on the part of private schools that they after getting one of their schools registered with the directorate started opening other branches by ‘unlawfully’ using the same registration number.
Responding to another query, he said that the inspection teams of the directorate would, however, ensure that no private school kept on fleecing parents by charging exorbitant tuition and admission fees.
Asked as to how much a private school could increase its fee annually, he said that they were allowed to increase tuition fee only by five per cent per annum at the start of a new academic year but it was mandatory upon them to get a prior written permission in this regard from the directorate.
Annual charges
When his attention was drawn towards the so-called ‘annual charges’, which a number of private schools are charging from its students although there is no provision to charge such a fee under the Sindh Private Educational Institutions (Regulations and Control) Ordinance-2001 Amended Act 2003 & Rules 2005, he said that the act had mentioned the word ‘fee’, some of the private schools had been extorting fee as ‘annual charges’ by misinterpreting that word.
He also clarified that a private school could charge admission fee from its students but it should not be more that three months tuition fee of their high classes i.e. Class VIII in case of a middle school and Class X in the case of a high school.