The private schools commission at the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry presented a proposal seeking to rephrase teachers’ contracts that could ultimately reduce the rate of social insurance.

The Ministry of Education, Ministry of Labor, Human Resources Development Fund and private schools Committee in the Chamber of Commerce started monitoring the application to raise the minimum wage to SR 5,000 in addition to a SR 600 transportation allowance.

Schools agreed to apply the decision but they still disagrees on paying the social insurance based on the SR 5,600 salary.

Ghazi Awad bin Taleb, the head of the private schools committee in JCCI, told Arab News that the proposal suggests a different structure for teachers’ salaries.

“Our suggestion is to keep the salaries at SR 5,600 — divided into SR 2,500 paid by human resources and SR 3,100 paid by schools. The change that we asked for will be in the contract itself. For example, the contract will be written as SR 1,500 teacher’s original salary, 600 transportation allowance and 1,000 as additional allowances. The social insurance will be paid based on the original salary, which is only SR 1,500. Therefore, teachers will pay 9 percent and the school will pay 11 percent of the original salary,” he said.

He added: “In a such scenario, total social insurance will be reduced with both schools ad teachers benefiting.”

According to Bin Taleb, changing the contract is needed due to several reasons.

“Teachers’ financial dues are usually paid based on the latest salary paid to the teacher. For example, if a teacher gets SR 1,500, and in the latest month of her or his service got SR 5,600, then resigned, he/she will get the financial dues based on the SR 5,600 not based on the SR 1,500. We think that such contract is unfair. Therefore, we suggest the HRDF, MoE and MoL to end the old contract and pay financial dues to teachers, then restart with new contacts,” he said.

Many private schools shut down because they were unable to pay the teachers new salaries. Other schools increased the salaries for teachers, but also increased tuition.

“Many private schools shut down as they considered the latest development a negative phenomenon in the Saudi education system,” said bin Taleb. “Other private schools started refusing intake of new students due to large number of students they already had.”

He added: “Government schools witness high demands from both Saudi and expatriate students, which also caused crowding.”