The Educational Consultancies Association of Nepal (ECAN) has expressed its serious concern over the initiative of the Ministry of Education (MoE) to suspend the registration process of new education consultancies.

It has also warned that it will not follow the ‘Education Consultancy and Language Trainers Directives’ if it is amended without its consent. The MoE on February 21 had suspended the process of registering new education consultancies after if found that no consultancies applying for the registration had trained counsellors as required by the Directives. The ministry has said the new registration process will be initiated after the proper amendment in the existing legal provision.

ECAN, however, has claimed that as the directives has a clear provision that those who worked for three years in the sector could also be accepted as trained counsellors, the MoE’s decision to scrap the registration process violates the provision of the Directives. “We object to the MoE’s move to suspend the registration process,” said Rajendra Baral, ECAN president. The MoE is working for the amendment as the current Directives gives ECAN the sole right to recommend consultancies for the registration process. Though a rough estimation shows there are around 1,000 education consultancies in the country, only 459 had applied for the registration. Currently, there are two umbrella bodies of the education consultancies in the country.

The MoE six months ago started a process to bring all the education consultancies, which were registered with Company Registrars Office, under its ambit for proper monitoring.

source:the kathmandu post,9 march 2015