Time to re-visit school fees caps

Schools will soon break off for term I holidays, and with that comes the dread of school fees hikes.

In 2016 the Education Ministry appointed a committee led by Prof. Ian Kayanja to look into school fees. His recommendations partly informed the December 2022 draft statutory instrument proposing a fees cap at Shs1,610,000 for boarding secondary school, and Shs1,220,000 per term for primary schools. Nothing came of the proposal though. Many schools continued to stick parents with palpably extortionate fees, ranging from between Shs2 million and Shs3.5 million this term!

Against the bleak backdrop of government’s ill-advised reluctance to impose a fees cap, many parents had breathed a collective sigh of relief over plans to finally actualise regulation of private schools as required by law.

It remains a stain on the country’s soul that the National Private Education Institutions Association rebuffed the idea of capping school fees. Their claim that a cap would bankrupt them hardly stands up to scrutiny. And neither does the rather rich reasoning that free market forces should determine the cost of education. Private school owners cannot argue that as purely private enterprises, they must earn a reasonable return on investment. There is nothing reasonable about what they are charging. Mr David Mugisa, head of the Uganda National Association of Private Schools and Institutions, told The East African newspaper in January that: Schools have been fleecing parents. We encourage the ministry of education to re-visit government’s School Fees Regulation policy proposal. After-all, Sections 3 and 57 of the Education Act, 2008 already authorise the education minister to regulate school fees. The minister must exercise those powers.

These unfeeling private school owners and their co-conspirators in top government-aided schools mustn’t operate in a vacuum yet we have appropriate laws for regulation. It is intolerable that the ministry never carried out its January threat to withdraw licenses from whoever contravened its directive against raising fees.It is dishonest of schools to cite post-Covid-19 inflationary pressures as an excuse for unfair fees increases. The honest truth is that high school fees are largely driven by two factors: greed and an irrational desire to replicate the home environment in boarding schools by, for instance, laying on comparatively costly meals. Good nutrition is not synonymous with how expensive a meal is.

Note too that the ministry had advised schools to freeze their ubiquitous building projects to allow for post-Covid economic recovery. Unfortunately, that sound advice was ignored. The high fees menace can be defeated. But it will require firm leadership from the ministry. It cannot be that opening up of education to private ownership meant that Uganda no longer considers quality and affordable schooling to be a constitutional right.