PESHAWAR: The elementary and secondary education department has directed all the education boards to stop conducting matriculation and intermediate examinations of the students enrolled in private high and higher secondary schools that are not registered with Private Schools Regulatory Authority (PSRA).
“Around 387 private high and higher secondary schools are not registered with PSRA but all of them are affiliated with education boards that are conducting matriculation and intermediate examinations of their students,” an official of PSRA told Dawn.
He said that such private schools had been functioning since long but their owners were not following instructions of PSRA about registration of their schools. He said that unregistered private schools were located in different parts of the province and merged areas. Those schools were affiliated with eight education boards of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, he added.
According to official data of unregistered private high and higher secondary schools, 196 private schools are affiliated with Peshawar Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education, 100 with Swat board, 47 with Mardan board, 10 with Malakand board, four with Dera Ismail Khan board and 15 with Abottabad board while 12 schools are affiliated with Bannu education board.
387 high and higher secondary schools in KP are not registered with PSRA
To stop this practice, the official said, elementary and secondary education department has directed all the education boards to de-affiliate unregistered schools.
Section 21 (1) of KP Private Schools Regulatory Authority Act, 2017, provides that “no school shall be opened or operated in the province, irrespective of its affiliation, if any, with the inland or foreign board or certificate awarding body or students assessment and testing body, as the case may be, without registration with the regulatory authority,” reads the letter of the education department addressed to the chairmen of all education boards.
The letter states that KP-PSRA has registered 11,587 private schools till date. However, a considerable number of unregistered private schools are still operating in the province, which creates impediments in proper estimation of the reported out of schools children in the province, it adds.
“In order to ensure strict implementation of KP-PSRA Act, 2017, and to discourage the operation of unregistered private schools, no school or its students shall be affiliated or enrolled for matriculation/intermediate examinations by education boards unless the school is duly registered with KP-PSRA,” the letter says.
A senior official at elementary and secondary education department told Dawn that a summary would soon be moved to chief minister to allow the controlling authority to de-affiliate all the unregistered private schools. “Once the chief minister approves the summary, the proceeding of de affiliation will be started,” he said.
The managing director of PSRA, Javed Iqbal, when contacted, said that the officials of the authority had approached unregistered private schools for registration but the owners never honoured their request for registration.
He said that the registration process was very easy and its fee was nominal. However, he said that there were some other reasons due to which the owners of private schools were reluctant to register their schools with PSRA.
Sources in PSRA said that private schools came into the notice of taxation agencies of federal and provincial governments and labour laws were applied to them after their registration with PSRA.
Due to fear of taxes being collected by Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Revenue Authority (KPRA) and provincial labour department, the owners of the private school were avoiding registration with PSRA, they added.
They said that provincial government fixed Rs40,000 monthly salary as minimum wage for unskilled labour while most of the private schools were paying lower salaries than the minimum wage to their teacher and other employees.
Published in Dawn, February 23rd, 2026.
