Private schools haemorrhaging money

For most people in Pakistan, private school seems like an unaffordable luxury, or an ‘unnecessary’ extravagance. One thing everyone agrees on is that education in private schools is expensive. School owners are charging exorbitant fees, making the lives of parents a living hell.

Private schooling is often chosen by parents to ensure their children receive a higher quality of education. The government schools are unable to provide quality education, leaving no option for the parents but to go for private institutions to educate their children and pay hefty fees.

Being a parent, I also go through the trauma of paying exorbitant fees for my son’s schooling every month. Fee structure of private schools has not only badly affected the middle class, but it is now breaking the backbone of rich families. Parents have become money-minting machines for such schools. While parents attribute the hike to commercialisation of education, the management in schools maintain that mounting inflation, new taxes and losses force them to hike their fees each year.

The most worrying fact is that despite spending a hefty amount, the quality of education being provided to children in private institutions is not very encouraging. Lack of trained and qualified teachers, deficiency of proper teaching materials and poor physical infrastructure of schools indicate the poor performance of this sector.

Numerous private schools in Karachi have employed unprofessional male and female teachers on low salaries. Some of the females are in fact housewives with little or no experience in teaching, while most males just choose this field to earn pocket money or as a pastime. Most teachers employed are given the task of teaching subjects that are outside their particular areas of study, leading to a weaker understanding of the subject for the suffering students.

But they cannot be blamed for everything. It is the responsibility of the school management to hire educated souls for the job. They charge a handsome fee but deliver little.

It has become a trend that big schools hike fees and when no action is taken against them, the smaller schools follow suit. Parents are at the receiving end and suffer the most.

In recent days, parents took to the streets in protest against exorbitant fees in different cities, while some also approached the court in the hope to get respite but the private school management seemed undeterred by these steps.

The government has failed to regulate tuition fees or take action against profiteering in education. It is time that the state takes corrective measures. The objective seems elusive, but room for optimism does exist.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 29^th,  2016.