The Minister of Primary and Secondary Education, Torerai Moyo, has said the Government will soon shut down all unregistered private schools.
Responding to questions from journalists during a Post Cabinet briefing on Tuesday, Moyo said all private schools should be registered or else they will soon face closure. He said (via The Herald):
The Government plans to ensure that we establish as many schools as possible because we have a deficit in terms of the number of schools. The latest information is that we have a shortage of close to 2 800 schools.
The shortage has seen the proliferation and mushrooming of schools which we want to define as private.
I have to be very clear, the private schools that we want must be registered with the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education.
Those that are mushrooming in the high-density suburbs in the majority of cases, are illegal schools because they are not registered. They are operating illegally.
Moyo said he will soon present a paper before Cabinet that will result in all unregistered schools being shut down. He said:
In fact, we are going to come up with a paper that I will present in Cabinet where we are going to outlaw those schools, perhaps we might give them a grace period depending on what Cabinet would have recommended. We are going to close all the illegal schools operating illegally.
As a Ministry, we are supposed to ensure that there is quality, equitable and inclusive education. But in the so-called private school that we have seen, somebody will have a school in his or her backyard, and learners are squeezed or jam-packed in a very small room and chances of diseases spreading are high because the condition compromises quality.
Those are the schools that we do not want. We want private schools to be registered according to the specifications of the Ministry where we can control the quality.
In 2022, authorities shut down 320 out of 448 schools and colleges in Harare that were operating illegally.
