Educationists predict doom if abridged curriculum is halted

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | Educationists and school heads have warned that Uganda’s education system might fail to recover from the effects of COVID-19, should the ministry of education fail to roll out the promised abridged curriculum.

As part of the recovery plan and ensuring that learners catch up on the lost time during the unprecedented school closure, the education ministry embarked on developing a condensed version of the current curriculum by extracting topics that are core to ensure that once acquired, the learners will be able to cope up with learning at the next level.

With the scheduled school reopening nearing, schools and other players in the education sector have been requesting the ministry to roll out the abridged curriculum and retool teachers on how to handle it. However, there was no reply to the call.

Uganda Radio Network has learnt that in one of the last consultative meetings on school reopening, the Ministry of Education informed participants that the curriculum was being halted for the moment.

“The (abridged) curriculum might not be rolled out. The meeting resolved that each school should come up with its own catch-up plan,” a source noted.

Hasadu Kirabira, the chairperson of the National Private Educational Institutions Association (NPEIA), who attended the meeting also shares that he raised the matter and he was surprised when told that each school will fend for its own.

Kirabira shares that halting the abridged curriculum is going to be the next big crisis in the education sector. He notes that the idea of leaving each school to think about its own catch-up plan is going to create chaos in the sector as individual schools will grapple to come up with an effective idea.

Micheal Kironde, the Director of Janan Schools, notes that schools cannot operate in the old curriculum when the ministry is discussing issues like automatic promotion. To him, there is no way learners who barely spent years in a given class can be pushed to the next class without interventions on how they will catch up.

Kironde adds that if this critical matter is left in the hands of schools, there will be inequality with a section of learners having better catch-up plans than their counterparts as it was during lockdown when a section of learners continued learning whereas the majority could not access education.

Filbert Baguma, the General Secretary of Uganda National Teachers’ Union, says if the ministry reopens schools without revising the content taught, it will have left schools to experiment on the learners.

“Some schools will overload the learners, others will under load them. It’s going to be chaotic everywhere,” Baguma said, adding that the ministry is behaving normally in an abnormal situation.

He further wondered why such decisions are thrown in at the last minute yet schools have been waiting for months for the abridged curriculum.

“We told them to openly discuss what they are planning and they refused. They said they were going to disclose at the right time, now with weeks towards reopening, they are telling schools to develop their catch-up plan. What should schools do now,” the General Secretary wondered.

To him, it will be difficult for the schools to know which content they can teach or ignore yet the abridged curriculum was supposed to create equity among all learners.

Uganda has closed schools for the longest time in the whole world, for the education sector to recover and regain the declining learning losses, experts have been advising that Uganda must consider shortening the academic year(s) but most importantly follow an accelerated syllabus that focuses on core subjects.

For months, the suggestions have been the talk of the town by most of the authorities from the education ministry, but the sudden turn on the abridged curriculum which is considered very important in the reopening plan is coming as a surprise.

In the recent past, officials at the National Curriculum Development Centre have been confident about the abridged curriculum with many freely discussing the matter. In one of the interviews with a local newspaper, Dr. Grace Baguma, NCDC Executive Director noted that the first draft had been finished and they were slated to invite teachers and experts to review the draft before it’s printed for distribution.

But in recent days, officials from NCDC became tight-lipped on the matter they were previously proud to share about. Sources who preferred to remain anonymous say that NCDC doesn’t have money to roll out the curriculum.

“NCDC had budget cuts and no extra money was allocated for this curriculum,” the source noted. Our reporter has confirmed that NCDC needed a budget of 2.1 billion shillings to roll out the curriculum in question.

In a recent interview, Dr Denis Mugimba, the spokesperson for the education ministry accepted that NCDC had budget cuts but insisted that the agency still had money to roll out the curriculum.

Dr Mugimba added that the final word on whether the curriculum will be used or not is awaited to be communicated by the minister when she is giving the reopening plan. He however adds that even if it has not been rolled out immediately, it can be used any time when the country or a given region is faced with a given challenge.

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