Parents Win, International Schools Lose Their Rulebook

Jul 19 , 2026. By NAHOM AYELE ( FORTUNE STAFF WRITER )

Federal Judges have struck down the Education Ministry's amendment to a directive on the General Education Sector Schools Licensing & Renewal, ruling it was issued without the required procedure, went beyond the Ministry's authority and contradicted superior laws. The three-judge panel ruled in favour of 132 parents of Sandford International School, who had contested the amendment as a device to legitimise a disputed tuition adjustment. It is a clean win after a year-long fight.

Judges at the Federal High Court have struck down an amendment that the Ministry of Education (MoE), under Birhanu Nega (Prof), made, ruling that it was issued without the required legal procedure, went beyond the Ministry's authority and conflicted with superior laws.

The three-judge panel of Yesuf Mohammed, Kedir Endris and Zenebe Gebrehiwot found 132 parents of Sandford International School (SIS), who had contested the revised directive, the General Education Sector Schools Licensing & Renewal, as a device to legitimise the school's disputed tuition adjustment, right.

The verdict is a clean win for the parents after a year-long fight, but it leaves a hole where a legal basis used to be. By cancelling the amendment, the Court removed the ground on which Sandford and other international schools, among them Flipper International School, had rested their fee-adjustment practices, and threw their fees into doubt at a stroke.

The amendment, made last year and cast by Ministry officials as “a transparency and efficiency measure,” drew a distinction between two things that look alike in a bill. A "tuition fee increase," it said, is "any additional charges imposed on tuition fees in comparison with the fees charged during the preceding academic year."

That excludes attempts to harmonise fees, defined as "standardising or unifying fees for the same subject or grade level to align previously varied charges." The distinction became a battleground once Sandford School’s Administration shifted lower-paying student categories into a higher one and called it “harmonisation,” not a rise.

Sandford is no ordinary school. One of Addis Abeba's oldest elite institutions, it opened in 1947, during Emperor Haile Selassie's reign, as a modest community school. Over nearly eight decades, it grew into a leading international school with more than 1,000 students from nursery to Year 13, Ethiopian and foreign alike.

The School sits within a vast system of 56,832 schools nationwide, according to the Ministry's School Improvement Program database, of which 48,444 (85.2pc) are public-owned and 8,388 (14.8pc) private, together enrolling an estimated 29 million students from pre-primary to secondary.

International schools have no separate classification and form only a small slice of private education, most of it in the capital.

In 2013, the School was restructured as Sandford International Endowment School (SIES), a charity under the Authority for Civil Society Organisations (ACSO). It is governed by a Board that includes the ministries of Education and Foreign Affairs, public figures and parents.

The dispute grew out of the School's own fee ladder. SIES has run four tuition categories, C1 to C4, set by enrolment status and fee agreements rather than grade.

C1 and C2 were mostly Ethiopian students who had enrolled under older fee structures and remained at lower rates; C3 was mainly international students paying higher fees, often denominated in foreign currency; and C4 were newer Ethiopian students on higher tuition.

When the School proposed folding the lower groups into C4, its administrators argued that all students receive the same education whenever they enrol; different tuition levels no longer made sense, and they called the move “harmonisation”. Parents saw a fee increase by another name, one that lifted C1 and C2 families into the costliest tier.

The matter reached the court of law after parents accused the School Administration of raising fees “without proper consultation”. The Administration answered that it was standardising, not raising. It grew more tangled when the Ministry issued its amendment while the case was live.

The parents argued that the change had been written to prop up the School's position and sway their litigation. The Ministry insisted it was a sector-wide clarification, not a fix for one dispute.

Represented by Zebene Fikrie, an attorney-at-law, the parents broadened their fight beyond the School to the ministries of Education and Justice, seeking the amendment's cancellation on the grounds that it was “unlawful” and gave schools a way to raise fees “under the label of harmonisation”.

Their submission held that the Ministry revised the directive “without sufficient legal grounds” and “skipped” the required steps, a transparent process of drafting, public review, comment and vetting by relevant institutions, the Ministry of Justice among them.

They contended that the Ministry bypassed all of it and lacked the mandate to amend at all, “leaning on powers the law does not grant and contradicting existing education rules.”

Their sharpest point was definitional. The amendment never spells out how a school should apply "fee harmonisation" in practice, they argued. The word can cut two ways, lowering higher fees to meet lower ones, or raising lower fees to meet higher ones.

“Moving families who paid less into a dearer category,” they challenged, “is that harmonisation or simply an increase?”

They warned that without a clear definition, any school could dodge the limits on fee rises by changing the terminology rather than the substance.

The parents also told Judges that federal lawmakers had baulked.

Parliament’s  Education Affairs, Human Resource Development, Employment & Technology Affairs Standing Committee, chaired by Negeri Lencho (PhD), and one of the chamber's more assertive bodies, which has repeatedly questioned the Ministry’s policies and government decisions, had written a letter questioning the revision, which the plaintiffs read as proof it had not received enough institutional review before it was issued.

Zebene, the lawyer, also faulted the Ministry of Justice for registering the directive despite contestations over its legality. According to the parents’ lawyer, legal advisors had written, asking the Justice Ministry not to, but it registered anyway without addressing their concerns.

Lawyers representing the Education Ministry rejected the account. Through its Chief Executive Officer (CEO) for legal services, Yoseph Shiferaw, the Ministry argued that the amendment created no new law but clarified existing provisions, and that revising a directive, rather than drafting one, did not require the full legislative procedure.

According to Yoseph, his Ministry “did not create new rights or obligations,” but only drew the line between a fee increase and “harmonisation.” The Ministry called the claim that the change was built for Sandford School “defamatory,” casting it as a sector-wide measure “targeting no particular school.”

The ministry argued that the Standing Committee’s letter reflected the “Chair's view,” and not Parliament's institutional position.

“While the House may review and question policy, a Chair's opinion, or even a Committee's, isn’t the House's decision,” he told the Administrative Bench. “The Ministry had sought clarification and held the amendment valid.”

The Ministry of Justice defended its narrow role. Through Yared Genet, a public prosecutor, it argued it has no mandate to judge whether a directive submitted for registration is legally valid, that testing legality falls to the relevant institutions and the courts, and that refusing registration on its own reading would trespass on another agency’s authority.

“Its duty was to register directives from authorised institutions and make them public,” said Yared.

He disclosed to the Judges that the request not to register arrived after registration was complete, and that the directive was not posted online immediately due to technical issues.

He also rejected the idea that the directive could not apply retroactively, arguing such limits mainly concern criminal matters and that, in a civil dispute, there was no bar to retrospective effect.

“It [the Ministry] had breached no procedure,” said the Prosecutor, “only a court order could undo the directive.”

Judges ruled in favour of the parents and ordered the amendment cancelled. The Ministry, they found, had issued the revision “without the legal procedure required to amend an existing directive, had acted beyond its authority, and had written parts that contradicted superior laws.”

The decision stripped away the basis Sandford and other international schools had used to justify fee adjustments as “harmonisation,” bringing relief to the parents who sued and fresh uncertainty to the schools that had operated under it.

Zebene, the legal consul, welcomed the ruling.

"We’re sure we would make this directive invalid,” he told Fortune. “Now every parent should be happy.”

Yoseph accepted the loss without embracing it.

"We aren’t happy with the Court decision, but we accept it because it is the Court's word," he said.

According to him, the Education Ministry is weighing whether to revise the directive again with harmonisation provisions while following the proper procedure, or to pursue the next legal remedy.

Whether a second attempt would fare better is the open question. Zebene, the lawyer, argued the problem cannot be cured by reinserting the cancelled provision in another directive, for the provision itself was “unlawful, introduced without clear legal authority.”

Daniel Fikadu, a veteran lawyer, agreed, cautioning that even a similar clause in a future amendment could prompt a fresh legal challenge if the Ministry still lacks explicit authority to regulate the matter.

He praised the ruling for recognising that international schools could use legal interpretation to raise fees, and for drawing a clear line between “genuine harmonisation” and an increase dressed up in other words.

PUBLISHED ON Jul 19,2026 [ VOL 27 , NO 1368]