Minister of Education, Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, has directed that the renewal of established school licence will be done every three years but schools are required to pay their licence subscription fees yearly.
The Minister said the yearly licence renewal “puts the schools on edge that this year, they are licensed, next year they may not be licensed and so, what we have directed as a ministry is that the licensing regime should be three years.”
He claimed that the Ministry of Education is separating licensing from the mere payment of fees that are due to the National Schools Inspectorate Authority(NaSIA).
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Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum explained that the extension of the licensing period to three years will decouple fee payment and licensing.
“In the education space, you cannot use year-to-year fee payment as licence. Licensing goes beyond fees and that then decouples the fee payment from licensure,” the minister stated
He explained that the yearly licensing regime was not the best, especially for expatriates, who might be looking for a school in the country, stressing that if the licensing period was one year, “he must be worried because the following year, the school may not be licensed.”
Dr Adutwum also stated that what the NaSIA intended to do with the publication of the list of schools that had not paid their licences for the 2021/2022 year was supposed to show that those schools were “delinquent and not that they were not licensed”.
“All that NaSIA sought to do was to indicate that their fees have delayed. They were no way saying that those schools that were published have no authority to operate in the country,” the Minister of Education said.
Until recently, schools were mandated to renew their licence each year as stated in Section 98 (2&3) of the Education Regulatory Bodies Act 2020 (Act 1023) and this is done by the NaSIA.