Uganda: After Two Years of Covid-19 Lockdown, Schooling Sector Struggles to Restart
In March 2020, President Museveni closed all educational institutions to curb the spread of Covid-19.
Institutions were allowed to operate gradually by October 2020 before a second wave of Covid struck the country again in June 2021.
As YUDAYA NANGONZI writes, there is some light at the end of the tunnel after the Ministry of Education and Sports recently approved the full reopening of all pre-primary, primary and secondary schools on January 10, 2022.
It is now up to parents to look for tuition fees amid the December celebrations and January blues. Here is a breakdown of the performance of the various education subsectors, as well as an outlook for the new year 2022.
TRE-PRIMARY AND PRIMARY
This subsector includes most of the learners, but little has been done in FY2020-21 since schools
were closed for two years – with the exception of candidate classes that had registered for national exams.
Despite the long stay at home, Uneb surprisingly reported improved PLE performance compared to the previous year.
Schools registered primary school students for national exams. Going forward, Uneb has agreed to administer PLE for all undergraduate students as long as they meet the credentials.
Uneb Executive Secretary Dan Odongo argued that when bans were put in place, efforts to recruit teachers for private coaching were seen by many parents, which bore fruit. To keep the learners busy at this stage, some teachers were actually paid well.
Teachers were charging up to Shs 150,000 per month, Shs 10,000 for two hours online, while others were collecting the teens in their homes to make a living. Until January, all students will be promoted automatically, but the Ministry of Education insisted that only those who are six years old go into elementary school.
Although Covid is still a problem in the country, kindergarten learners are unable to follow standard operating procedures for social distancing and wearing masks, but have been cleared to study.
“We have allowed kindergartens and elementary schools to open because we have made significant strides in vaccinating teachers and other school staff. Second, Covid does not affect these learners as much as adults do.” [the teachers]; they only get mild cases, “said Ministry of Education and Sport spokesman Dr Denis Mugimba.
However, he agreed that the social distancing issue will be difficult at this level – one reason the government insists on wearing masks and vaccinations for adults who interact with learners at school.
SECONDARY
Overall, the secondary school program was poor (40.1 percent) because several goals were not achieved, according to the Budget Monitoring and Accountability Unit (BMAU) of the Ministry of Finance.
For example, the annual science fair was not held because funds were reallocated to Covid-19 activities; Teaching materials for math and English were also not procured.
Under construction, only 14 of the 16 schools carried over to the 2020/21 financial year were completed. “For new work in the 2020/21 budget year, contracts were signed for 24 of the 34 planned schools and progress was very slow, with the exception of Ntare School, where the construction of a multi-storey dormitory was 30 percent advanced,” says the BMAU report .
Fortunately, the unit costs of Universal Secondary Education were increased from 41,000 to 58,000 and the Universal Post O-level Education and Training (UPOLET) from 80,000 to 90,000 Shs. The subsector also licensed and registered 80 and 114 private secondary schools, respectively.
With schools reopening in January, secondary school teachers have a difficult job implementing the lower secondary curriculum, which the pioneers, now automatically promoted to S2, studied for just three weeks in the first semester of 2020.
Some teachers weren’t fully trained to deal with the changes in the curriculum, but on the same day, January 10th, a new class is also enrolling for the 2022 high school.
BTVET
The BMAU also rated the business, technology, vocational training (BTVET) sub-area with poor results in the 2021/21 financial year. This is mainly due to the government not supporting their programs while other projects are six to nine years behind schedule as donor-funded projects are dwarfed.
This subsector is vital in curbing unemployment if it is effectively funded to create skilled workers for the labor market. Good performance has been seen in institutions such as the Directorate for Industrial Education, which has developed and reviewed 78 assessment training packages for the revised lower secondary curriculum.
UNIVERSITY EDUCATION
When the universities were allowed to reopen to finalists after the first closure, virtual and blended learning became the order of the day. To date, most universities have put in place an infrastructure to facilitate online learning.
However, universities have more work to do in terms of recruiting staff and students to online resources as ICT is not yet recognized as an alternative form of teaching.
It’s worth noting that in a few Covid-related speeches, President Museveni wondered how universities would rate students online without cheating.
Even so, universities went ahead to administer the exams and distribute successful students.
At this level, the University Financing Council (HESFB) has also expanded the credit options for post-graduate students in the final academic year. Since 2014, the HESFB has only sponsored first-year students exclusively in natural science subjects.
The National Council for Higher Education has accredited 80 degree programs, inspected two institutions for charter and issued provisional licenses to three institutions in 2020.
SPECIAL NEED TRAINING (SNE)
This subsector has been badly affected by the lockdown, particularly in relation to the availability of learning materials for learners. While other learners received study materials from the government in good time, the SNE learners waited a little longer for special materials.
In the meantime, the department managed to organize the first national symposium on inclusive education aimed at improving the SNE.
In an effort to improve the lives of learners, SNE Commissioner Sarah Bugoosi Kibooli called on the government to look into certifying learners with severe cognitive problems as society considers them “stupid”.
“A learner with cognitive problems may not even pass elementary school. Most of them spend more than seven years in elementary school, but at the end of the cycle they have no credentials. Such children, even if they have been in school for 100 years. ” , cannot pass PLE. So we need to find ways how they can be assessed without taking UNEB exams to advance to other levels of education, “Bugoosi said.
NEW INNOVATIONS, POLITICS
To streamline the teaching profession, the Cabinet adopted the long-awaited National Teacher Policy, which requires all teachers in Uganda, regardless of educational level, to obtain a degree in pedagogy or a postgraduate degree in pedagogy.
From this academic year 2021/22 onwards, all Bachelor of Education students will study for four years, three of which, according to the new guideline, are full-time studies including school practice.
For in-service teachers with no degrees, they have until August 2029 to graduate, while those who will turn 60 by 2029 have the opportunity not to graduate but cannot return to classrooms without degrees.
Last fiscal year, the Education Policy Review Commission was set up in May 2021 to review the government’s existing 1992 White Paper on Education.
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The Commission will interact with the public, stakeholders and educational stakeholders and is expected to complete its work after one year.
Other guidelines that are currently being drafted are; Early Childhood Care and Education, Education for Sustainable Development, National EMIS Policy, National Teaching Materials, National Inclusive Education, School Health, Government White Paper on Higher Education, National Higher Education, and Sport and Sports Policy.
Most draft policies have to be approved by the cabinet, while some are at the national consultation level. When the schools reopen, the ministry will begin piloting the new Education Management Information System (EMIS) to get up-to-date enrollment and drop-out rates from learners and teachers away from the old manual.
The new system is expected to screen ghost students as the information is integrated with that of the National Identification and Registration Authority (NIRA).
BUDGET
In the 2020/21 budget year, the revised budget of the education sector was Shs 3.7 trillion. Of this, Shs 3.6 trillion (97 percent) was released and the spending totaled 95 percent.
According to the BMAU, the sector’s budget development was overall fair at 54.1 percent. This was mainly due to the limited information available on key outcome indicators such as school enrollment growth rate and student / class ratio as learners were out of school.
The BMAU found that delayed payments of funds from the Ministry of Education to the spending programs or departments and delayed procurement processes also had an impact on the development of expenditure.
In the course of converting the sector to National Development Plan III, the BMAU came to the conclusion that links between interventions and sector results must be created critically by clearly naming the indicators and ensuring that the measurement of the indicators’ contributions to the sector results are assessed will.
