Dubai: With fees as low as Dh280 to Dh350 per month, Shaikh Rashid Al Maktoum Pakistan Higher Secondary School in Dubai is struggling to offer quality education.
The community school, which is run by the Pakistani Consulate General in Dubai, offers one of the lowest fees in Dubai to cater to the mostly low-wage Pakistani residents in the country. Average private schools in Dubai charge tuition fees ranging from Dh600 to Dh2,500 per month.
“There are 1.3 million Pakistanis living in the UAE. It is the second largest expat community here, and the majority of our people are from the low- income group, so their earnings in some cases don’t even allow them to afford the Dh180 to Dh350 fee,” said Javed Jalil Khattak, Consul General of Pakistan in Dubai.
Despite these constraints, the school had more than 1,200 students on its waiting list last year. Currently, the school has 1,400 students.
Khattak said many students can’t even pay the school fee, with some families accumulating up to Dh10,000 in unpaid fees that eventually get paid by philanthropists.
“The school is not a business entity; it is a community school, that means it has to run on fees. If you do the maths of the fees collected from the students and the expenditure, you can see we are dealing with very little money, especially with the increasing population.”
Khattak said the increasing Pakistani population, which has grown from 120,000 in the 1980s to 1.3 million today, leads to a high demand for the low-fee school.
Quality suffers
Because of the financial difficulties, the Consul General said the school’s infrastructure, teaching quality, teacher salaries and, hence, quality of education are suffering.
This is evident in the Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA) annual report, which has ranked the school as ‘unsatisfactory’, the lowest rank possible, for the last six years.
“The KHDA has announced that we can increase the fee by a certain percentage (2.92 per cent) but that is a small percentage. You could only increase the fee if you fall in a certain category like good (4.38 per cent) or outstanding (5.84 per cent),” said Khattak.
Principal Dr Abdur Rashid Bangash said not being able to attract talented teachers because of the low fees is the biggest reason for the low ranking and low quality of education.
“The problem is finding quality and talented teachers in the market that will accept our low salaries. The salaries in our school range from Dh2,000 to Dh3,500. We have a high turnover because of this and, whenever we have a good teacher, competing schools lure them with higher salaries,” said Bangash.
This was evident in the KHDA report of the school for the year 2014-15, which read: “Most teachers had low expectations for their students. In most lessons, teaching was mainly teacher-centred and did not engage students in meaningful or sufficiently challenging tasks.”
Bangash also said the infrastructure of the school and the introduction of technology has suffered as well.
The report read: “The school did not have internet access within the classrooms and the use of technology was not promoted as part of the teaching and learning process.”
