Parents need to brace themselves as next year is going to be a particularly tough one when it comes to paying school fees.

This according to Times Live as the inflation rate for school fees is set to increase drastically. Currently the inflation rate is steady at 4.9 percent per Trading Economics, but that does not affect the inflation rate of education.

That’s going to change in 2019, however, with it is set to increase to 8.2 percent at public schools and 7.8 percent at private schools.

Economist Azar Jammine warns that the above inflation increase at high-end private schools is going to result in more and more people no longer finding it affordable to pay fees and moving to former Model C schools instead.

“Private schools are becoming the ambit of the corporate elite, one is finding that some of the ordinary decent professionals are now really struggling to keep pace with some of the private fees,” said Jammine in a statement to Times Live

Exacerbating the issue is the fact that more  parents are applying for fee exemptions and schools are finding it hard to cope with the large number of fee- exempt students. Hoerskool Pietersburg in Limpopo is expected to grant fee exemptions totalling R4.6 million to 260 pupils next year after granting R4.2 million this year.

The headmaster of Hoerskool Pietersburg Willie Schoeman noted that the Provincial Education Department paid 68c a day to each of the school’s 1 269 pupils this year and they had not received a cent from the Department of Education for fee exemptions that were granted to pupils.

“The number of people applying for school fee exemptions will grow, we try and push battling parents to pay something even if it’s R200 per month. Parents of 93 students still owed R1.8 million fees this year,” concluded Schoeman.

With issues compounding when it comes to schooling, it looks like parents will be paying a serious premium to educate their children in 2019.

[Source – Times Live]

[Image –  CC 0 Pixabay]