The Ghana National Association of Private Schools (GNAPS) has charged its members to maintain the fees they have been charging for the past three years.

It said members should not use the increases in utility tariffs and other social services to increase fees but charge the old fees to reduce the burden on parents and guardians.

'GNAPS is appealing to its members to withhold any increase in fees for the 2010-2011 academic year. We are asking them to use the fee levels agreed upon between the GNAPS and the Ghana Education Service (GES) three years ago,' the President of GNAPS, Mr Godwin Sowah, said in an interview with the Daily Graphic yesterday.

He said normally the 'fees were determined according to the country's living index', and urged all zonal executives to ensure that the appeal to maintain the old fees was carried out without any difficulty.

Mr Sowah said GNAPS had been collaborating with government for the past 20 years, and that there had been a GNAPS-GES Committee on Fees which prescribed the fee levels for all GNAPS schools.

He said most of the schools that charged high fees were purely commercial entities which did not charge fees prescribed by the GES and GNAPS, saying that 'these schools make parents believe their facilities are fully-airconditioned, assuring parents that after senior high school their children would gain automatic admission to universities in Europe and America with no visa problems'.

Some of the schools which charged high fees, he said, had teachers who were paid in dollars and pounds with their curricula based on European and American standards, among other things.

'We ask that the GES would take the trouble to advise parents in the way they should go so that they do not inflict financial hardship on themselves in the attempt to access basic and secondary education,' he said.

Mr Sowah noted that, GNAPS would continue to collaborate with the GES to make education accessible to all Ghanaians.

He expressed concern about the laxity in the control and monitoring of private schools, and called on the GES Private Schools Unit to be up and doing.