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Officials of Indian community schools and several parents have proposed a two-shift system to address the severe shortage of seats in Indian schools.
As the admission season draws to a close, worries of parents who have yet not succeeded in getting their kids admitted in any school are aggravating. The new academic year in Indian schools is set to start from April.
Not only perturbed parents, the officials of various Indian schools think that the short-term solution to the shortage problem lies in the launch of classes in two shifts (morning and evening).
“The number of existing community schools cannot serve the current population of Indian expats and therefore the viable solution at hand is the launch of two-shift classes,” said AK Srivastava, Principal of Birla Public School.
He said that to address the problem of school admissions, they had floated the idea to the authorities at the Ministry of Education but the move could not bear fruit in the past. “It is still the immediate solution to address the shortage of schools. With the available infrastructure and hiring separate staff, the schools can launch a second shift of classes because establishing a new school demands huge resources,” Srivastava noted.
Talking to The Peninsula, Saikat Ghosh, a resident of Wakrah, said that all of his efforts made in the last three months to get his child admitted in a kindergarten had ended in failure. “Whichever school I visit, I am told that they have reached their capacity and no more seats are available. In my opinion, the short term solution lies in two-shift classes,” he said, adding that in case he could not secure any seat, he would be compelled to send his family back to India.
The owner of an Indian school, requesting not to be named, said that the swift available solution to the existing problem was the launch of two shifts in schools.
“Though some more schools are set to open this year, it will not resolve the issue as the population of Indian expats has increased manifold in the last few years.”
He said that the start of two-shifts at schools was a viable option to address the issue at least on a short term basis until the number of educational institutions met the growing demand. “It will bring great relief for worried parents who currently are unable to secure admissions for their kids. Every school has a specific number of seats and they cannot exceed that limit and therefore the introduction of the evening shift will help both parents and the school managements,” he added.
Syed Ibrahim Siddiqi, an Indian expat, wrote to The Peninsula that he has been trying to get seats for his twins for four months but all his attempts met a dead end. In his email, he alleged that the online registration mechanism of various Indian schools was a “scam”. “Schools' online registration is a scam. Actually, they never opened the link and they had taken kids internally. The online mechanism was just an eye-wash and to show the so-called transparency,” he alleged.
He further says that some schools were giving admissions to siblings. “When we called them, they said they were not entertaining from the general category,” Siddiqi writes, adding, “This is a big scam by Indian schools who in the name of siblings-intake are admitting children through references.”
He says: “This is not only my experience as I know five of my colleagues who all went through this pain. We request the concerned authorities to help the parents who are worried about their kids’ future.”
