Economy palava: What schools now do to retain patronage

The high cost of living has made many parents to consider changing their wards from their former schools to a cheaper one.

Factors like high transport cost, increased school fees, cost of textbooks, and other essential demands from schools like introduction of new uniforms and sports wear have triggered the decisions of parents to change their children’s schools.

Another crucial factor is the performance of a child. These parents see paying huge school fees and others as a waste, and to cut costs, they now take their tchildren and wards to cheap schools.

Economy& Lifestyle discovered that schools’ managements seeing this, have now deciphered various means to salvage the situation, one of which is to add to scores of failed students in order to keep patronage.

Mrs. Kemisola Muyiwa, a former nursery school teacher said: “Many schools are coming up with various tactics to retain parents taking their children out of their schools.

“You know the economy is not smiling and nobody has the money to waste. When parents see their children failing, they want to change their schools.

“As someone who has taught in a private nursery school before, we were told by our director to add scores to the pupils who didn’t perform well so that their parents won’t get angry and change their schools.”

A few years back, a child’s failure didn’t trigger the parents changing his or her school. Instead such parents allow the child to repeat the class.

This makes the child to be determined to improve in academics seeing his or her classmates have progressed to the next class. Schools were using this method a lot and parents accepted it gratefully. But today, this method has gradually died.

Mrs. Helen Onanuga, a business owner, said she knew that her son’s performance was manipulated after complaining of his performance and disclosed her plans to the management to change his school.

“My son is in Junior secondary school. Recently, I changed his school to a less expensive one because their fees are expensive and his performance is poor. Also the distance from home to the school is far.

“ I told the school of my plan to take him to another school. All of a sudden my son whose performance wasn’t encouraging started scoring high marks.

“As a person who has taught before, I knew something was wrong. I decided to test my son on the same things he was taught and he failed woefully. I was very sad. But I knew they were trying to retain patronage but in a way that would kill my son’s future.

“I eventually changed his school. If I weren’t observant, I would have fallen for such a scam. I pity many parents.”
In recent times, many school managements have introduced various formats and solutions to ease the burden of school fees payment, text book buying, sport wears among other things.

But some have made it mandatory to pay for these items once, hence posing a lot of burden on these parents who are left with no option than to change their children’s schools.

Mr Joseph Amedu, a guidance and counselling professional said that this act doesn’t only damage a child intellectually, it affects him in all areas of life.

“Increasing a child’s score at the detriment of retaining patronage is unprofessional. Yes, the child will be promoted to next class where his intellect may not fit in. Such a child that has been helped all through his years in school cannot perform intellectually when he eventually leaves the school.

“He will keep manipulating his ways in any area he finds himself throughout his lifetime and the result will be drastic.”

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