The National Association of Proprietors of Private Schools (NAPPS), FCT Chapter, says it has developed an application that will enable members to report cases of children leaving them for other schools while still owing school fees.
President of the association, Mrs Olusola Bankole, made this known in an interview with the newsmen in Abuja on Wednesday.
Bankole added that the app would also enable its members to report the movement of “teachers who commit offences in one school and decide to run away to other schools’’.
“We have emphasised training and retraining. There is something I have always told our members; what goes around will surely come around.
“If you train (teachers) and I also train them, before we know it, we will have trained teachers being recycled to our schools.
“But we are making huge effort to ensure professionalism.
“For instance, we (have) just developed an app that will enable schools to report cases of children leaving them for other schools even when they are owing school fees.
“We also intend to report teacher movement. If a teacher commits an offence in one school and decides to run away to another school, we should be able to report it and make it known.
“We are working on that; the app is ready and we only need to deploy it nationwide.
“We are not resting on our oars; personally, as a lead person in the National Association of Proprietors of Private Schools in FCT, I am not too satisfied with how far we have gone; but we have gone far.
“We have training and retraining for our teachers and even as proprietors, we keep telling ourselves the bitter truth that we need retraining and to be candid, many of us are buying into it.’’
The president of the association said that NAPPS would not accept a situation where private schools would operate below standard.
“Which profession is there that does not have quacks; we have quacks also in the private school sector.
“Since I came on board, I have actually had to suggest to some private schools to close down.
“Reason is, if you can’t run above par, that is, above what the public schools around you are doing, then you are not good enough to be a private school.
“Allow these children to go to public schools that are close by, reason is, if a school is charging N20 per day as school fees , how will they pay teachers?
“If a school is charging N5000 per term per child, how will they pay salaries to teachers?  What quality of teachers will they have?
“That is not to say that there are not so many schools that are very cheap as private schools that are not doing a lot of outstanding things, which is one of the things that makes NAPPS different.
“There are many of those schools that have some of these challenges that are not our members. That’s another challenge we have.
“I can attest to it that 95 per cent of them are not our members.”