Should students and parents struggle to make school owners richer?

The Dubai government is expected to issue a new timeline for  payment of school fees. The move aims to help parents and administrators, according various media reports.

The initiative is designed to prevent problems with the mode and timing of fee payment experienced in recent years, according to a senior official from the Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA).

The move comes after reports that some schools are seeking fees a semester in advance, which is not allowed according to the current regulations.

For example, in 2011 Repton school requested parents to pay six months upfront a registration fee of AED10,000. Letters were sent warning them that no school places will be hold for their children otherwise. Repton school, however, continued to accept plenty of new-coming students in the course of the following academic year. It faces very high students’ withdrawal rate on annual basis and school places had never been an issue during the few years since it opened. The school stated that it had obtained a special permission from KHDA at the time, but no one has seen the official letter to justify that.

By requesting school fees upfront, schools are merely increasing their profits. Their managing parent  companies, which in many cases are investment vehicles or business groups,  often use the significant funds for other purposes. Supposedly, the administration of Repton school collected AED10,000 from approximately 1000 students’s parents back in April 2011. The total amount calculates to 10 million dirhams. What kind of school operations they need to fund between April and September to justify such expenses, providing the months of July and August  are summer holidays?

Mode of school fees payment and when the money is due is a much-debated issue and the KHDA’s recently-launched School Fees Framework is aimed at addressing and streamlining the process to benefit parents, students as well as school managements.

Why parents and students should struggle to benefit school owners?

“The objective behind the development of a framework to regulate school fees is to protect the students and their parents as beneficiaries of educational services, as well as to provide a favourable environment for investors in the education sector and encourage them to improve the quality of education in the emirate of Dubai,” told Gulf News Mohammad Darwish, Chief of Regulation and Compliance Commission at the KHDA.

School owners are businessmen and they view education as a service for sale. They shouldn’t be allowed  to open doors at first place, if they are not well equipped and ready to provide services to the customers. There must be strict high standard requirements towards school owners. For example, Repton school requested advanced school fees payments, because it needs funding to complete its facilities. However, the school is now in its fifth year of operations and the facilities are not yet completed, although it opened with the highest at the time school fee framework in Dubai. How a business can provide quality services if its facilities are not completed?

Presently, many families in Dubai struggle to pay school fees that in most of the cases do not match the quality of education children receive. If payments are to be arranged upfront, many students will be affected, as the majority of middle class parents live on a monthly budget and will not be able to pay tens of thousands  dirhams as a school registration fee six months in advance. Later, in  the beginning of the next academic year, parents will have no option but to move children between schools.

A clear perspective of the problem could be obtained by researching the school fees payments trend within schools’ financial departments. One may be surprised to find out how many parents are late on their payments; how many cheques are on hold and how many had bounced.

If education is viewed as business, consumers’/clients’ interest should be considered as imperative. In a competitive business environment, enterprises struggle for market share and profits, but not vise versa.