Gujarat government to amend fee regulation act; schools with 99% pass result, 75% average score may get freedom to set fees

Around 4,500 self-financed secondary and higher secondary schools are registered under various education boards in Gujarat.

As per the criteria prescribed for School of Excellence, the schools should have a pass percentage of 99% to 100% in Board examination.

Other criteria is that at least 60 students should have appeared in the Board examination from such schools. Besides, the average marks of students in Class X should be 80% or above. For Class XII, it has been set at 75% or above. These would apply to all the schools registered in the state with the Gujarat Secondary and Higher Secondary Education Board, CBSE, or any other boards.

A Scrutiny Committee and an Empowered Committee have been formed to prepare the list of Schools of Excellence among the applications. Before going ahead with the amendments, the state government has invited suggestions and feedback from the public this week.

“The School of Excellence will be awarded entirely on the basis of performance of the school. The idea of exempting them from the Act is to allow private schools to excel and focus on each student,” Principal Secretary, Education, Mukesh Kumar told The Indian Express.

In a recent order in this regard, the state government cited ancient universities like Taxila, Nalanda and Kashi that had “their own identity all over the world”.

“Even in Gujarat, if 1% of private schools are given autonomy, they can focus on their own education and extra-curricular activities and try to take them to the highest level. By bringing all the schools in the state under the same fee structure, all those schools will perform the same kind of infrastructure activities and instead of moving towards excellence, they will only work towards (being) homogeneous. If it is found necessary to take such special schools to their maximum potential of excellence, it is necessary to grant them partial exemption…,” the order issued by the state education department on Wednesday stated.

“If the amendment is made in the law, the schools will strive to achieve 100% pass result, work on the performance of individual students to improve the performance, thus automatically improving the quality of education as well as result in better performance in NEET, JEE and other competitive exams,” Kumar said.

As part of the procedure, the state government will invite applications from private schools, which will go through scrutiny and empowered committees. Officials said that schools will be required to submit a detailed development plan of five terms along with the fee structure to the Scrutiny Committee for approval.

If the schools declared as Schools of Excellence fail to meet the eligibility criteria in the subsequent year, they will be given one more term to meet the eligibility criteria, failing which they will be removed from the list.

Under the Gujarat Self-financed Schools (Regulation of Fees) Act 2017, no-self financed school can collect any fee in excess of what has been fixed by the Fee Regulatory Committee (FRC) for admission of students to any standard or course of study. The private schools could be penalised a fine upto Rs 5 lakh for the first contravention.

While the cut-off limit for pre-primary and primary schools is Rs 15,000 per annum, for secondary and higher secondary schools offering general stream, it is Rs 25,000. For higher secondary schools with science stream, the upper limit is Rs 30,000 per annum.