Over 150 private schoolsface closure

JEDDAH: The Ministry of Education has set up a committee to study the difficulties faced by private schools in continuing their operations smoothly.
Private school managers recently petitioned the minister of education, Prince Faisal bin Abdullah, calling for a speedy intervention to resolve their issues.
“More than 150 private schools are threatened with closure because of their inability to fulfill the regulations for running schools in line with the new conditions governing building space, safety, teacher recruitment and insurance payments,” said Abeer Ghazawi, owner of a private school. She was speaking on behalf of private schools in Jeddah and Taif, narrating the difficulties facing private schools. Her statement was published by the Al-Madinah daily.
“We fear the entry of unqualified foreign investors into the Saudi school education sector, which would adversely affect the education environment in the Kingdom,” she said, commenting on reports of foreign investors planning to buy private schools facing closure. 
She attributed the hardships faced by private school owners to various reasons such as the refusal of the Civil Defense to issue safety certificates to some school buildings on the grounds that the schools were operating in facilities with residential licenses.
This is compounded by the fact that the Ministry of Education does not renew school licenses without a safety certificate issued by the Civil Defense. The owners demand that a school should be allowed to operate, even if it is in a residential building.
Another burden on school owners is the high social insurance premium they need to pay to the General Organization for Social Insurance (GOSI) for each teacher. The subscription to the GOSI is doubled because it is calculated on a teacher’s total pay, while the school management only needs to pay half of the salary, as the other half is a government subsidy. The schools demand that the insurance subscription should be commensurate with the salary they actually pay to teachers and not on the basis of the total salary.
The school owners also request that the ministry should not compel them to pay vacation salaries to teachers.
Another difficulty faced by private schools is their inability to find qualified Saudi teachers in certain specializations. As such, the school managers call for an exemption to the existing regulations regarding employment and permission to either recruit teachers or to appoint qualified expatriate women, who are present in the Kingdom but restricted to their role as housewives.
Yet another compliant from private school managers stems from the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs' law regarding space. The ministry has specified that a pre-primary school must have 900 square meters, while facility quarters and other school complexes must be 7,500 square meters. The existing schools find it extremely difficult to fulfill this condition, especially in a city like Jeddah where land is hard to come by, Ghazawi said.