City School looks for listing in the stock market

Pakistan’s second largest education group, the City School is looking to list its shares in the stock market.

The school chain wants to raise $40million to buy land and real estate, Farzana Firoz its founder told Bloomberg during an interview on Tuesday in London.

“A good 60 percent of our students aren’t in purpose built campuses, that’s why we’re here,” she said. “What we want to do is consolidate our schools and that means real estate, buying land, making campuses. You owe it to the children to institutionalize the set-up.”

By placing its shares in the stock market the school will become the first firm in the education sector to do so.

The school started with a campus in Karachi in 1978. Now it operates 192 schools all over the country.

In recent years exorbitant fees of private schools have come under criticism by parents. Last year, a large number of parents from elite private schools including the City School, made it to the streets in cities like Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad to protest fee hikes.

Interestingly Firoz criticized private schooling in her interview to Bloomberg. “The participation of the private sector is not a solution to the problem of education, the biggest provider of education across the world globally is the government and that role cannot be replaced by the private sector,” Firoz said. “It’s like giving cake to the country when they need bread.”

A whooping 25 million children in Pakistan are out-of-school, education advocacy campaign Alif Ailaan states in its reports.