Increased tuition costs prompt parents to transfer their children to schools with lower fees

Parents of students in private schools said that they were forced to look for alternative schools for their children with low fees, due to the increase in school fees that has become a burden on the budget of families, especially those with two or more students.

Engineer Khaled Abdel Hafeez, a guardian of two students, said: “I have two students in the second cycle, studying in a private school, and I pay them tuition fees of 36 thousand dirhams, in addition to 4000 dirhams for school transportation services, but the school administration informed us that it had obtained approval to increase the fees by 3%.”

He added, “The owner of the property we live in has decided to raise the rent by 20% after three years of renting it, so the rental value of the residential unit is 45 thousand dirhams,” noting that these increases, whether in school fees or rent, are pushing him to look for a school with fees lower than the fees of his children’s current school.

Marwan Shehab (father of three students) believes that a family member who is looking for a school with lower fees will ignore several issues, most notably the transfer from one educational curriculum to another. If a student is studying the British curriculum, he will look for another curriculum with a lower cost, and he will not focus on the quality of some of the services provided by the school.

He stressed that he is looking for a school for his three children with low fees that suit the family budget, because he is facing an increase in tuition fees and school transportation services, exceeding 5,000 dirhams for each of his children.

He stated that the quality of the educational process is something that the school alone will not achieve, and the family must be a partner in this process, and support the school’s efforts to raise the student’s educational level, explaining that the student’s educational level will not differ from one school to another unless the family neglects to care for the student, so choosing a school with lower fees does not mean that the student’s academic level will decrease as long as he finds support from home.

Fatima Youssef (a student’s mother) said that her daughter is currently studying the American curriculum in high school at a private school, but she is looking for a school that teaches the ministerial curriculum for two reasons: the first is that its fees are low, and the second is that when the student joins the university, she will not be asked to have her certificate equated.

For her part, the deputy director of a private school that follows the ministerial curriculum, who preferred not to be named, said that the school witnesses a large turnout from parents of students who wish to register their children in the school every year at this time, noting that a large number of these students are transferring from schools that follow foreign curricula.

She stated that the school has a waiting list of the names of these students, because the number of applicants exceeds the places allowed in the school, noting that the most prominent reasons for families transferring their children are low school fees, the school’s good reputation, and the school’s proximity to the student’s family’s residence.