NaSIA officials have said publicly that they would begin penalising private school operators who fail to get their schools registered and licenced by January 2024.
In an interview with Daily Graphic, Inspector-General of Schools Dr. Haggar Hilda Ampadu said, “The law has been in place for the last three years, and we have done stakeholder engagements, jingles on radio and television stations, and billboards.”
Those who run schools that aren’t up to code “just don’t want to comply,” she told the outlet.
According to Dr. Hilda, the Fees and Charges Act mandates a licencing cost of GH300 per level for private pre-tertiary schools using the Ghana Education Service (GES)/NaCCA (National Council for Curriculum and Assessment) curriculum.
That works up to GH1,200 per year for a typical private school offering pre-K through 12th grade.
However, the Inspector-General of Schools stated in an interview with Graphic that the annual charge for licencing a typical international private school that runs the Cambridge or other foreign curriculum begins at GH3,000.
According to the NaSIA representative, the Fees and Charges Act 2022 (Act 1080) mandates a penalty of GH6,900 in addition to 10 times the amount of the licencing charge for noncompliance.
To continue, Ampadu “I think that is exorbitant and I don’t think anybody will want to suffer that,” Dr. Ampadu remarked. The rule mandating licencing of private schools is here to stay, and as such, everyone in the industry must now comply.
On the other hand, we can shut down a school or even go to court to force a noncompliant operator to comply.
That’s why I want to encourage private school management to work with my inspectors, who are out there every day gathering information, as she put it.
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She encouraged independent institutions to let the inspectors in, warning that “denying a government official access to your school” might result in legal repercussions.
Because “the law says we should come to your school at any time to see what you are doing there,” Dr. Ampadu said, “it means you are not complying with the law.”