Government to grade private secondary schools

Feb 20, 2009

The Ministry of Education and Sports has launched an initiative to grade private secondary schools from one to five star up to one star.

By Fortunate Ahimbisibwe

The Ministry of Education and Sports has launched an initiative to grade private secondary schools from one to five star up to one star.

The process of grading schools aims at boosting the quality of secondary education and gathering credible data and information about existing private secondary schools in Uganda.

“The initiative seeks to prevent and limit deceptive advertising of private schools in the mass media,” a statement from the ministry of education said.

The Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB) recently complained that most private schools did not have laboratory equipment, which had undermined their performance in the Uganda Certificate of Education (UCE) exams.

The ministry has contracted AfroEducare Limited to carry out the grading, which starts later this month.

The ministry will carry out inspection and gather photographic, video, documentary and/or audio evidence from each school. The findings will be published in the Schools Catalogue 2009, with school profiles and their grade results.

The initiative seeks to address the risks and dangers that children are exposed to by some private secondary schools, such as fire outbreaks, buildings collapsing, drug abuse, moral decadence, increasing academic failures and drop outs, teacher misconduct (strikes, absenteeism) and teacher mistreatment (non payment of salaries, lack of job security).

“The same kind of schools have been reported to be involved in deceptive advertising in local and regional (East Africa) mass media, making false claims to facilities and services they actually do not have, resulting in many parents being conned.

“This has attempted to tarnish the image and reputation of the education system of Uganda locally and internationally,” the statement says.

The ministry will evaluate the student learning progress and services, student welfare, health and safety, the schools’ financial sustainability, facilities, premises and accommodation. There are 1,114 Government- aided secondary schools and1,800 private secondary schools throughout the country. According to the admission statistics, government -aided schools admitted about 170,000 students, while private schools admitted 90,000 students.

Education officials say more than 250 sub-counties do not have a government-aided secondary school, which explains why 310 private schools are implementing Universal Secondary Education (USE).

However, some private schools do not have the necessary requirements critical for teaching and learning, especially of science subjects.

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