News about Uganda can be both funny and distressing. A new report just released indicates again that dark clouds are fast gathering over the future and benefits to the country of the Universal Primary Education (UPE) which is in its 15th year of implementation.
For the third year in a row, the report by Uwezo, a not-for-profit agency tracking the quality of education in East Africa, has made a damning indictment of the program that is meant to take many Ugandans to the next level and pull them out of poverty.
The assessment discovered that despite efforts by Ministry of Education and Sports towards improving education in the country, many children in lower primary are still struggling to read English and do basic mathematics.
According to the 2011 Uwezo Uganda National Report, a disturbing number of Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE) candidates under the UPE program cannot read or comprehend a passage of Primary Two level. They cannot count either.
The findings show that 9 out of every 10 children in P3 could not read and or understand an English story text of P2 level difficulty, 7 out of every 10 children in P3 could not solve numerical sums at the same level while 7 out of every 10 in P3 to P7 could not read and or understand a P2 level test.
The 2011 assessment report further highlights that 6 out of every 10 children in P3-P7 whose mothers had post-secondary level of education could read and understand a P2 level text, while 7 out of every 10 of children in P3-P7 whose mothers had never acquired any level of education couldn’t read and understand a P2 level test.
Some years back, primary seven teachers were subjected to sit the same exams as their students and shockingly, 7 out of 10 failed the exams. That passed by and was laughed away as a national joke. A few years into the introduction of the UPE, many students especially in the northern and eastern regions of the country scored zero in their exams. In many schools, there was not even a third grade student. That many seemed, to many, a problem too far away to concern us as a nation.
But when this becomes the norm rather than the exception, we must as a nation start asking very hard questions. We must ask the right questions because the answers seem to be known but the questions may not be the right ones!
Anyone who has been to school probably knows that it is a lot harder to score zero in any test than to score 100%. And so when a student scores zero, we should ask, were they taught? And if they were taught, were they taught the right things? And if they were taught the right things, did the person teaching them know what they were teaching? Did the students understand what they were taught? Did someone care to know if the students understood? Did the teachers have the right qualifications? If they did, did they have the relevant teaching materials? And very crucially, is the syllabus relevant or does it alienate both the teacher and the taught?
Uganda’s public education sector has taken the largest share of the budget in the last six national budgets but, according to Uwezo, this investment is not reflected in the output.
To compound the problem, according to a 2010 UNESCO report Uganda has the highest school dropout rate in East Africa and the lowest proportion of children staying in school up to Primary Seven.
A follow-up of every 100 pupils who joined Primary One in 1999 showed that only 25 reached Primary Seven in 2006. In Kenya, 84% of pupils reached Primary Seven. Tanzania stood at 81% and Rwanda at 75%. Rwanda has made the greatest improvement with the numbers rising from just 52% in 2009 to 75% in 2010.
In a different study by the Uganda Government, on average at primary school level, half the pupils who enroll in Primary One do not complete Primary Seven in the set time frame. For instance, records at the education ministry show that only 444,019 pupils sat for the Primary Leaving Examination in 2009, out of the 890,997 who enrolled in 2003. Thus a total of 446,978 either dropped out or repeated a class.
Fact about UPE
90% in P3 cannot read P2 work
90% in P3 cannot do P2 Maths
90% in P3 cannot do P2 test
Data from the education ministry shows that school dropouts in the country are higher at primary level than at secondary level.
A 2006 World Bank report shows that in Malawi and Uganda, where fees were abolished over a decade ago, many more children from poor households have entered school. Yet, in both countries, half of the households with children who have dropped out of school cite lack of money as the main problem.
With these sobering statistics, where is the future of the country? No country ever developed or pulled its people out of poverty without qualitatively developing its human resource.
Between the 1960’s until the late 1980’s, Uganda’s public schools and education system were the envy of the region and even the continent. The schools were generally rated as the finest in the country, well-funded and well run, with excellent teachers. These schools served as engines of social mobility and gave many of our leaders today the functional and educational grounding that helped them rise to the top.
Most of the best brains in this country are products of very rural primary schools, some of which sadly no longer exist. The best secondary schools in the country were public - Budo, Namagunga, Kisubi, Gayaza, Mwiri, Tororo College, Nabumali High School, Teso College, St. Joseph’s Ombaci, Nyakasura School, Ntare School, Tororo Girls, Namilyango, Kigezi College, Layibi College, Nabisunsa, Nabbingo, name it.
Today, most of these schools are a disaster, beset by dysfunction and disrepair. Schools that were front page now rank at the bottom by most measures of educational achievement.
Education has been and will always be the safest and fasted way up the socio-economic ladder
At the higher education level, post-secondary education has become so integrally linked to individual economic well being that it is now deemed one of the “essential components of cultural and socioeconomic development of individuals, communities and nations”. As such, the higher education degree credential, over time, has become the principal entry point into the most modernised sectors of the economy and middle or upper class status.
The decline of Uganda’s education has been the subject of so much debate that it has now come to a near stalemate. But the consequences of this lackluster attitude towards education by the government have quickly become apparent. As Uganda’s education standards have almost collapsed, social mobility aided by education has slowed to a near standstill.
The need for a better education for most Ugandans has never been more urgent. We need to get the basic things like the curricula right. While countries that value education, have for example focused on maths and sciences, in Uganda degrees have proliferated in “fields” like leisure and hospitality, development studies (whatever that means!) etc. Our people are too poorly educated to compete in this century. To compete, we either must raise our educational standards or we shall be left out and left behind. But how do we do this?
The answer is simple. Get more and great teachers, pay them well and treat them with the same professional respect we accord to lawyers, engineers, doctors, accountants etc. But developing great teachers requires an extremely rigorous and competitive process. They must be subjected to entry exams to a teaching job and continuously assessed and given regular periodical training to widen and upgrade their knowledge base. The teacher-student ratio must not defy the principal laws of meaningful learning.
In Uganda, most teachers at primary and secondary level were most likely not the top students in their graduation class. Teaching has been relegated to “those who do not excel in class”. Then what do we expect of our children who are taught by those we almost despise in academic achievement?
We must involve the teachers and students in our planning. As long as we exclude teachers and students in our planning, there will never be meaningful achievement because learning is controlled by teachers’ and students’ classroom activities. Most of the teachers have a ‘mixed bag’ in their classes and this is very important to consider when planning. There are pupils with special educational needs who are sometimes labeled as dull slow learners etc. and on the other end there are the gifted and talented pupils.
The first group of students is the one which does not receive enough attention in class because of lack of resources, and it is this group that most often brings down the percentage pass rate of institutions. Government needs to pour a lot of resources in schools; by first providing adequate facilities and tools and then training special teachers who will work with pupils with special education needs. If all teachers can adopt the policy that every child matters and apply formative assessment this will improve learning and raises the standards.
Many of Uganda’s students suffer from mathophobia (fear of Maths) for example, and this affects their performance in other subjects but some argue that there is no positive collinear between performance in Maths and performance in other subjects. From my own experience and observation as a student and over the years, most students who are very good in Maths are generally confident in other areas of their curriculum.
Dyscalculia (a result of visual perceptual deficit of sequencing problems) generally affects some students at many schools and most teachers I have talked to do not have any solution to this problem. This brings in the issue of the individual education plan, which is a planning, teaching and reviewing teaching tool. Most teachers are not aware of the existence of kinesthetic and visual learners within their classes. The needs of these students are, therefore, not addressed.
Most schools in Uganda do not have computers and students still use logarithm tables to do their mathematical calculations and this has affected their Maths results at all levels. Uganda will remain inside the black box unless her schools imbed the right standards, good teachers and the right teaching tools.
Lastly, we must set national education standards. Teach our students what is relevant and not just what someone thinks they should know. Then the students themselves must work hard, and by working hard, is not meant loading the students with so much after-school work that they become social misfits.
I went through school at time when teachers were teachers! It gave me an impressive base of knowledge and taught me how to study hard and fast. Most of all, these teachers to whom I am eternally grateful taught me to how to think. We need to go back to “then”, when our education at its best taught you how to solve problems, truly understand the material, question conventional wisdom and be creative.
This is what made our schools and education system great and it can be so again.
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