With the summer vacations nearly upon us, schools have once again started issuing fee vouchers for the months of June and July, demanding an advance fee for the two months that schools would remain off. 

However, the deputy director of institutions has clearly stated that fees for the summer vacations cannot be collected together, as a lump sum, months in advance.

The issue arises every year and earlier schools issued vouchers for the June and July advance fee in May, a month before the summer break. However, often parents who wished to shift students from one school to another would take the summer vacation as a chance to do so and save the fee for the two months that they would have had to pay otherwise. To prevent this from happening, schools are now demanding vacation fees, two to three months in advance, adding to parents’ burdens unnecessarily.

In response to criticism, schools say that their teachers and staff need to be paid for the two vacation months and that money has to come out of parents’ pockets. It has previously been suggested that schools structure their fee in such a manner that they break up the payments for June and July throughout the school year and do not have to demand June and July fees as a separate heads each year.