The Central Level Fee Determining and Monitoring Committee has directed private and institutional schools to not hike tuition fees for the new academic session that starts in April.

A meeting of the committee, held under the chairmanship of Director General at the Department of Education (DoE) Lava Deo Awasthi, directed all of its subordinate district level committees to determine fees that do not exceed last year’s structure. The committee also includes representatives from private and institutional schools and guardian associations. The decision comes two weeks after private school operators decided to increase fees equal to the country’s inflation rate, which is around 10 percent. “As per the Supreme Court verdict, no schools will be allowed to hike

their fees,” said DoE Director Tek Narayan Pandey.

A division bench of Justices Tahir Ali Ansari and Baidya Nath Upadhaya had directed schools to not hike their tuition fees every year on May

23 last year and asked the Prime Minister’s Office, the Council of Ministers and the Ministry of Education to effectively monitor

compliance. The court directed the schools to only hike their fees once every three years

Giving a final verdict on a writ petition filed by three advocates—Shree Krishna Subedi, Kapil Pokharel and Rabin Subedi—-last year, arguing that the majority of private schools were defying the Supreme Court direction and charging exorbitant fees, the SC had further ordered schools to not increase charges for admission forms and placed a ceiling on expenditure for advertisements. Schools running up to grade eight will be allowed to spend a maximum of Rs 300,000 on advertisement while secondary levels can spend upto Rs 500,000. All schools will have to submit the details of their total

advertisement expenditure to the respective District Education Office by mid-March.

“Placing hoarding boards outside of schools premises will also be banned from the new academic session,” Pandey said. According to him, the schools will not get to start any sorts of admission advertisement before March 14 and start admission procedures only after March 28.

Surprabhat Bhandari, chairperson of the Nepal Guardian Association and a member of the committee, said that the meeting has also decided to institute a blanket ban on the sale of textbooks from schools premises and require that students be given a booklist a month prior to the beginning of the academic session.

There are nearly 10,000 private and boarding schools across the country. All schools will need to have their fee structures approved by the district level fee determining committee two months before the new session starts.

source: The Kathmandu Post,14 feb 2013