By Patrick Kaboyo

THE use of SMS by the education ministry to disseminate exam results is welcome. This innovation should lead UNEB to addressing the gaps in the UNEB Act of 1983 which do not match the current trends of population growth and Uganda’s education evolution.

The UNEB Act should be amended to address the many innovations that are still in stock.

There were efforts in December 2008 to amend the Act. However, it is confusing to have two sector laws, the Education Act of 1970 (now the Education Act 2008) and the 1983 Act targeting the same stakeholders who contribute to education legislation.

Education stakeholders know that among the ten functions of UNEB is the 1983 Act, Article 4 clause (i) which states that UNEB shall make rules regulating the conduct of examinations and for all purposes. However, the rules therein have addressed examination malpractice with kid gloves.

The rules should address important components of examination mismanagement ranging from setting, briefing, moderating, managing, monitoring, distributing, marking, releasing of results and awarding certificates.

Much as UNEB is coming up with innovations, it is illogical for any innovation to come and be abused because nobody is accountable.
Innovations should be legally inserted in the existing law to create collective ownership of the innovation.

Innovations sought by UNEB should be by law incorporated into the 1983 Act and should be applied to all examinations that are in UNEB’s docket; namely, Primary Leaving Examinations, Uganda Certificate of Education, Uganda Advanced Certificate of Education, Uganda Junior Technical Certificate, and Community Polytechnic Certificate of Education.

UNEB further needs to start a system of rotating its officers as as a way of addressing the unethical conduct within the system.

Unethical conduct range from favouritism extended to some special schools that are marked with a lot of favour because they are protected by some powerful officials who are never changed from their offices which they have held for over three decades.

Article five of the 1983 Act states that all proceedings of the UNEB board shall be strictly confidential. On this basis we can leave UNEB to continue administering its oath of secrecy to its examiners, but we need a new law that stipulates what should be secret and what should not and for what reason.

It is through such a legal requirement that issues like abnormal charges of examination fees levied by head teachers will be addressed.

There are both primary and secondary schools that exorbitantly charge UNEB registration fees of candidates that is thrice the fee that is officially communicated to the public by UNEB.

The new law should come to address what happens to head teachers who run away with UNEB fees that are collected from poor students who later find out that what they collected was not remitted to UNEB.

In addition, the different committees of UNEB should have officers with a clean record. These officials should be deployed for official reasons without impartiality. The recommenders of these officials to these committees should not have strings attached and those recommended should not pay any allegiance to officers within UNEB, but to the country.

The UNEB law should go an extra-mile to address the special treatment given to a few private and government schools which are marked and handled with utmost attention that the rest of the schools do not enjoy.

UNEB should strive to have its officers recruited from different schools by law and not having a chain of them connected to one school. We hope that the new UNEB law will be able to address these and other challenges.

The writer is the executive director of the Coalition of Uganda Private School Teachers Association