Articles

Government to take action on overpriced pre-schools

Published by SchoolAdvisor | Jul 27, 2016

Parents are urged to file complaints with the Ministry of Education in the event, if they are charged excessively by private kindergartens when registering their children.Deputy Education Minister P. Kamalanathan said this would enable the ministry to monitor and take appropriate action against the kindergarten operators involved. He was commenting on a news report that some private kindergartens were charging up to RM9,000 a year for a pupil.Kamalanathan said kindergarten operators could not arbitrarily raise or charge outrageously because they were subject to certain specific rules and mechanisms set by the ministry.He said the factors which determined the rate of payment for private kindergartens included their location, student enrollments, the quality of learning methods and the qualification of the teachers.Kamalanathan elaborated further on the business concept of private kindergartens which he acknowledges differs from one operator to another. He said that the choice was up to parents themselves, depending on their financial ability.In another development, Kamalanathan said the Pepatih MySekolah application that was implemented in four schools was a pilot project to test its effectiveness. The bio-metric based technology used in the application would allowed parents to monitor the children’s attendance by downloading the application in their smartphones.“While schools may have specific reasons to use this application, the ministry has underlined that such an innovation can only be implemented after obtaining the approval of the students’ parents,” he said.The first system of its kind in Malaysia has been implemented since January this year in four schools, namely Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan (SMK) Batu Muda in Sentul, SMK Dato’ Ibrahim Yaacob in Jalan Ipoh, SMK Sungai Besi as well as in SMK Selandar in Malacca.- UTUSAN