The Monitor: It's Time to Review Universal Primary Education

The following editorial appeared today in the Monitor, one of Uganda's two newspapers. The conditions it describes match those of the schools in our Uganda Orthodox Church Education Mission, which are located mainly in rural areas:

Editorial: The Monitor, Kampala, January 15, 2005

The primary school leaving-examinations released on Thursday revealed one stark fact that many in the education sector had feared to pronounce. The universal primary education [UPE] policy, started eight years ago, is quite wanting.

The results show that urban schools have performed considerably well, while the majority of rural schools posted miserable performance. Kampala, Entebbe, Mbarara, Kabale, Masaka and other major municipalities, save for northern Uganda, produced most of the best results.

Districts even in more advantaged and peaceful districts like in Buganda produced dismal percentages in the first division and alarmingly higher percentages in Division U [i.e., high school], which denotes undeclared results— to be more precise, failures.

Parents in urban areas are generally richer and have more good private schools to choose from. Private schools provide full meals, remedial classes and many amenities that make school interesting.

In UPE schools, pupils go without meals, despite the government appeal to parents to provide lunch packs to their children. School grants are too limited to cater even for basic scholastic materials like textbooks and chalk; teachers are poorly paid, and the salaries are generally late.

In many schools, head teachers use their limited funds to buy chalk when as they wait for the schools grants. Education officials and teachers fear to talk about these problems lest they are accused of undermining a government programme.

Now in its eighth year, UPE should be offering close to one and a half million candidates. Instead, only 400,000 sat for the PLE examinations. The dropout rate is increasing and even many of those who stay to complete P7 just ending up failing examinations.

The Ministry of Education is currently mooting the idea of introducing mid-course examinations before pupils are admitted to P5. This is an unhelpful option. It is time the government reviewed the implementation of UPE to make the system more meaningful. UPE is a bold and worthy project, but it must be executed properly.

Many formerly good government aided schools have become a sorry shadow of their former selves. The fear of the state reigns as the schools slowly sink and more able parents opt for the private schools.

The government must cause a review of the implementation of UPE. The government must also reach out to founding bodies of the schools it took over for help to salvage the primary school system.