Private schools get fee carte blanche

The Ministry of Education and Higher Education has said private non-Arab schools are free to charge whatever fees they deem appropriate.
Additional charges, which some existing and new schools have started levying of late, are also set at their own discretion.
“We don’t interfere in fee structures,” an official at the Ministry’s Private Education Administration, which is also referred to as the Expatriate Schools Presidency, told Gulf Times yesterday.
The Ministry’s announcement follows complaints by several parents who claimed that private schools were ripping them off by levying a host of charges, some even non-refundable. This, they complained, was in addition to the “high tuition fees” private schools are charging.
“Just to get my third child assessed for nursery, I had to pay a non-refundable QR500 fee this week. Last year I paid QR400 each for my other two kids at the same school. But if a child is turned down, your money is gone,” an extremely upset father told Gulf Times.
“Then there’s a QR3,500 charge, again non-refundable, that I paid for registration. There’s also thousands of riyals for stationery every term and students still have to return the books at the end (of the school year),” he added.
Yearly average for his seventh-grader stood at over QR28,000 while that for the third-grader was around QR25,000.
Other parents said they were “too desperate” to get their children’s education going at any cost, knowing they are being “extorted” because of shortage of schools.
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