PESHAWAR: The Peshawar High Court (PHC) on Tuesday issued a notice to Secretary Education Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and sought his reply regarding the inability of the establishment to regularise the fee structure of private education institutions in the province. A two-member bench of PHC comprising Chief Justice Mazhar Alam Miankhel and Justice Muhammad Dawood Khan heard a petition submitted by Peshawar Bar Association president Amjad Ali Marwat. The petitioner urged in the hearing that unlike the other provinces KP has never had a formal authority to maintain a check and balance over the private education institution regarding their fee structure and other issues. Advocate Amjad Ali Marwat said that due to unavailability of a regulatory authority in the KP, private education institutions have been the centre of the business for the public to invest. He said the institutions knew they could increase fees whenever they felt like it as they were not regulated by any structure. He urged the bench to ensure that the government should characteristically establish a proper authority in the province to regularise the fee structure and other rules of business for the private education institution, ranging from schools to universities like other provinces of the country. The member bench of the PHC, after hearing the petition, issued a notification to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa secretary of education and has sought his reply regarding the situation. It is pertinent to mention here that the Provincial Assembly of Punjab had earlier passed a bill in 2015 with certain amendments in it later to enact a law on private education allowing the provincial government to regulate registration procedures and tuition fee revision at education institutes. Noor Islam, a private school teacher in the Faisalabad district, said that unlike KP, private institutes in Punjab were forbidden from exorbitant fees because one-time admission and security fees could not be more than the monthly tuition fee charged by the institute. It is also prohibits institutes from requiring parents to purchase uniforms, textbooks or other educational material from a particular shop.