The Ghana National Association of Private Schools (GNAPS) on Wednesday expressed regret about comments by officials of the Ministry of Education seeking to link private school proprietors to the leakage of the recent Basic Education Certificate Examinations (BECE).

"We deem it a betrayal, an insult and an act of frustration and displacement for high placed authorities to link up school proprietors to the scandal, in the manner they have so done", Mr Wilberforce Owusu-Sekyere, General Secretary of GNAPS said at a press conference in Accra.

The GNAPS said various statements given by both students and teachers clearly showed that they all obtained the question papers from the "open market". It was therefore unfortunate that the committee's report lacked the courage to put the blame at its proper place. GNAPS said the report of the committee set up to investigate the leakage, failed to give detailed statistics of the schools and the subject papers involved, the manner in which the circulation was done, the circulating agents or the perpetrators. It therefore called on the Minister of Education to make such statistics available as a means of checking any future occurrence.

The association said the leakage of the BECE questions had for the past two weeks or more tortured the minds of authorities, parents, pupils and government bodies into whose hands Ghanaians had entrusted the whole exercise of education, evaluation, standardisation, measurement and certification. It said none of its members had a hand in or knowledge about the process that brought the question papers out of the security rooms where the handlers had kept them.

"No private school proprietor was involved in the circulation process because we believe that, the only way to make the highest grade is good supervision, committed teachers, high teacher-pupil ratio, motivation, prompt and regular supply of teaching aids, regular and serious involvement of parents in the education process and judicious use of contact hours."

GNAPS has therefore asked Ghanaians to hold the Ministry of Education and its agencies responsible for what had happened. "We charge them for lack of concentration, for lack of firmness of purpose and focus." It assured parents and guardians that members of the association would not charge any extra fees to prepare the pupils for the re-sit and advised parents to report any proprietor who would ask their children to pay fees.

GNAPS suggested to WAEC to have its own printing press to enable it to maintain the confidentiality of its questions or be put in the hands of trusted security personnel. It also said that the security system at the WAEC should be overhauled to weed out corrupt personnel and motivate the hardworking ones to protect the hard won reputation of the council as the best examination body in Africa.