‘Despite challenges, schools have embraced the new curriculum’

Schools across the country have responded positively to the new competency-based lower secondary school curriculum that incorporates vocational aspects of learning as the country moves away from theory-based teaching, Ministry of Education and Sports officials have said.

Ms. Judith Akurut, an official at the Ministry of Education, said more than 3,000 schools have already registered for the Directorate of Industrial Training (DIT) assessments.

“There is a positive response with “vocationalisation” of education. When you visit these schools, you will see many projects that have been undertaken by the children showing at least that we have attained a few milestones and parents appreciate,” said Akurut during a recent stakeholders’ dialogue in Kampala organised by Economic Policy Research Centre and the African Centre for Economic Transformation (ACET), Ghana.

The dialogue was organised under the Youth, Employment and Skills PACT programme, which brings together policy makers and technocrats to discuss issues of skilling, and access to employment challenges for young people.

In 2020, Government of Uganda launched a new lower secondary school curriculum to address skilling challenges that face the country’s education system. An EPRC report on teacher-training, however, found that the introduction of the curriculum was premature with a lot of issues holding back its full implementation. The issues include inadequately trained teachers, and the limited training materials and books. During the dialogue, teachers implementing the curriculum reechoed the issues pointed out by the study.

Ministry of Education officials, however, noted that the introduction of the curriculum was intentional and that the challenges noted in the study would be addressed along the way.

Mr Alfred Kyaka, the assistant commissioner for secondary education, stressed that the new lower secondary curriculum fits well in the paradigm shift as demonstrated in the skilling Uganda programme. He said it dispels the thought that one needs to go to technical schools and colleges to be skilled.

“Nobody knew that given the mass number of learners at secondary, we can use them as conduit to massive skilling of Uganda.”

See policy brief: Teacher training and re-training are critical for delivering the competence-based lower secondary curriculum

Dr. Bernadette Nambi, the deputy director of the National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC), said: “We have trained [teachers] but not all. We trained on average about 32,000 teachers on the content of S.1,2, and 3 for the northern and eastern regions. We haven’t gone to the central and western regions.”

She added: “We are also yet to train on assessment modalities. Assessment is the most complex issue in this curriculum because the teachers are still confused about assessment both in the classroom – formative assessment –end of year assessment, and end of cycle.”

She agreed that there was a challenge with training teachers where some people sent for training were not teachers but “friends, relatives [of the headteacher],” she said.

In the dialogue steered by Dr. Madina Guloba, EPRC Senior Research Fellow and Elizabeth Birabwa, the EPRC Programmes Manager, it was agreed that YES-PACT advocacy should continue to “promote enforcement of the mandatory skilling of teachers in the reversed lower secondary curriculum for at least 10 days per annum; and promote the development and use of online teacher-training modules on the issue of practical implementation of the lower secondary curriculum implementation.”