who will take action .

THE ISSUE: Educational institutions are considered centres of learning, but private schools in Qatar are becoming more centres of earning. Saturday, 18 September 2010 04:21
Education is being commercialised the world over, making people wary, but primary education is not as expensive anywhere in the developing world as it is here.

Rough estimates suggest that a family with two school-going children spends no less than 25 percent of its income on children’s education alone.

Limited-income families with no homes of their own spend a huge portion of their monthly earnings on house rent and children’s education and are left with little or no savings in the end.

Money is involved in just about anything a private or sometimes even a community school does. Admissions and back-to-school times are nightmarish for a student’s parents as schools introduce additional charges as “special fee”.

Then there are deposits which private schools without exception ask for. Deposits are a good source of income for a school since hardly any parent remembers to reclaim it when his ward is leaving the school for good.

Not all parents are so meticulous as to retain deposit receipts and the result is that deposits literally mean a financial windfall for many a school management.

The annual tuition fees of private schools are in thousands of riyals, and in many cases go up to as much as QR35,000 and beyond.

And this is aside from the other fees a school levies. And, except, perhaps, a few schools, the quality of education imparted is questionable.

Many private schools employ educated yet untrained housewives as teachers. This is largely true of play and nursery schools as well as kindergartens, which have of late been mushrooming here due to a sudden population explosion.

Private and community schools literally remained unsupervised until a private education directorate at the Ministry of Education came into existence.

The schools tended to take undue advantage and raised their fees almost every year with little restraint due to a severe lack of official supervision.

Things changed a bit after the Supreme Education Council (SEC) was set up as a regulatory body for all schools a few years ago. But except that one occasionally hears in the media of directives being issued to schools by them, hardly any worthwhile impact on the functioning of private schools is visible.

Perhaps barring a few schools which follow the curriculum of prestigious educational boards such as Cambridge, curriculum remains a problematic area in the case of most schools, as they profess something and practice something else.

One hopes the SEC pays special attention to the curriculum followed by private schools, in particular.

A close scrutiny of teachers is also called for to make sure that no one without a teaching diploma or degree is hired by a school as a teacher.

Most private and community schools are notorious for paying low salaries to their teaching staff, lack of sufficient teaching staff which implies additional workload on the existing teachers, having long working hours and denying pay packets to their employees during long vacations.

This, coupled with work visa restrictions with regard to single women teachers, explains why private schools fail to attract trained and qualified teachers.

To make money schools go on enrolling students regardless of their limited infrastructure and the result is that classrooms are crowded with students clamouring for attention from teachers.

Some Asian schools are notorious for this and the irony is that they easily get away with violating local and international norms.

School supplies, uniforms and text books are another moneyspinning racket for private schools. The culture of cuts and commissions is said to thrive if a school is not supplying textbooks and stationery on its own.

An Indian school, for example, had a monopoly on selling textbooks as it had its own exclusive outlet.

A rather unwelcome development has been a sudden rise in stationery prices. But parents have no option but to buy expensive stationery for their school-going children.

School transportation is yet another area of concern for parents, while it is an additional avenue for exploitative school managements to make money.

Not all private schools have transport arrangements (buses) of their own. Some do have buses but their number is insufficient to ferry students to school and back home.

The result is that these schools rely on private minivan operators and car owners who have no employment other than illegally offering their services as transporters.

These transporters are on the school’s payroll and while the school charges the students’ parents exorbitantly for transport services, the vehicle operators are given a lump sum every month by the school management.

These transporters have no training or experience of dealing with schoolchildren and yet they operate openly with no questions asked by the state authorities.

No caretakers accompany them to keep an eye on the children and ensure their safety while travelling or alighting from the vehicle.

The drivers of these vehicles, most of whom are illiterate and unemployable, double as caretakers. An example of the disastrous result such a practice can have was the incident on May 17, 2010 in which a four-year-old girl student of an Indian school died after being left locked up in a minivan that had carried her from her Al Wakra home to her school in Doha, where she did not get off apparently because she had dozed off.

Some schools levy up to QR1,000 and more from parents as transport charges with no safety guarantee for their children.

Private tuitions are yet another racket for some teachers of private schools who sometimes operate in tandem with school managements. Many Qatari families like their children to be helped in studies after school hours and they mostly look for English language teachers who demand anything from QR3,000 to QR5,000 a month.

Expatriate students too rely on tuitions but mostly for science and mathematics in higher classes.

THE PENINSULA