Economy palava: What schools now do to retain patronage

Pupils on resumption day

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 children 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.