Private education

The crisis in Punjab’s education system on the issue of regulating private schools has become serious after around 97,000, or half of the province’s private schools, observed the first day of a two-day strike on Tuesday. At the start of the academic session in September 2015, parents of Punjab’s private school students were greeted with an unusual tuition hike. Some of the parents decided to protest the high school fees and low-quality education. The situation left the Punjab government facing a dilemma. Having let private schools do whatever they wanted for the last two decades, the provincial government was suddenly faced with a demand to regulate fee hikes. Without an adequate legal framework to respond to the protests, the government took ad-hoc action against the fee hikes by nullifying them and promising strong penalties against any school that refused to comply. With parental pressure forming the backbone of government action, this strategy worked. And, for once, the government also decided it would speed up the process of making the required legislative changes to avoid the issue coming up in the future.

Earlier in February, the Punjab Education Institutions Bill (2015) was passed which proposed to limit fee hikes to below five percent every year and increased the penalties for any schools failing to comply. It also mandated that all private schools within the province must get themselves registered within a 45-day period if they wanted to remain open. Two of the three private schools associations in the province have called the said law ‘draconian’, alleging that the intention of the bill was to ‘strangulate’ private schools. While private school associations may be correct in blaming the government for the poor standard of public education, most of their demands seem to have little merit. The reality is that a regulatory mechanism for schools has been long overdue. It is also true that even private school education is so poor that students rely on expensive tuitions outside of schools to keep up with their coursework. The true crisis of Punjab’s educational institutions is witnessed by the popularity of these tuition centres. While regulating education is important, much more needs to be done by the state in the sphere of public education. That requires much more than controlling school fees.