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The parliamentary group of the ruling Justice and Development Party (PJD) has submitted a proposal to ban Moroccan private schools from selling textbooks.
The PJD calls for updating Law 06-00, which regulates the work of Moroccan private schools.
In recent years, many private schools in Morocco began asking students to purchase their textbooks from the schools themselves or from designated bookstores.
Many schools specifically adopt textbooks that are not commonly available in bookstores in their curricula to force students to buy them from the schools or their partner suppliers.
Read also: Moroccans Accuse Private Schools of Greed Amid COVID-19 Crisis
The PJD considers such practices to be anti-competitive, allowing Moroccan private schools to monopolize the selling of textbooks. The practice negatively impacts the revenue of bookstores, the party claimed.
The parliamentary group also claimed that the selling of textbooks goes against the legal nature of private schools — as service businesses specialized in education, rather than trading businesses.
The proposal that the parliamentary group recently submitted suggests adding a new article that prohibits such practices to the second chapter of Law 06-00. Chapter two of the legal text relates to the obligations of Moroccan private schools.
The proposal also included modifications to article 24 of the second chapter of Law 06-00. The chapter defines the penalties enforced against schools that do not respect the legal text.
“The parliamentary group seeks, through this proposal, to preserve educational institutions, especially private ones, as places for learning and education, exclusively,” the PJD wrote in a statement.
