PLE: Can rural schools outperform urban schools?

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OPINION

By Rev. Fred Sheldon Mwesigwa

According to the recently released 2025 Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE) results from the Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB), rural schools performed better than those in urban areas, much to the chagrin and disbelief of proprietors, administrators and parents. The seemingly abnormal twist in the tale led even the state minister for primary education, Dr Joyce Moriku Kaducu, to go on the defensive, promising to probe into possible reasons why many urban schools were posting poorer results than rural schools.

Who said that rural schools do not have intelligent students? I am reminded of the wise words of the late Rev. Francis Isingoma, who used to say tihariho kyaaro kyabasiru, literally translated as “there is no village of fools”. To him, even the remotest villages were endowed with some of the smartest brains, except that there are contextual inhibitions that render an intelligent child to be “intellectually emaciated” as a result of being denied the ‘building foods’ that would lead the child to morph into a star performer.

There is a wide range of ‘building foods’ like proper feeding through provision of hot meals at school and milk, which some have all along been denied; the absence of teachers to teach students, let alone, the headteachers to supervise; the failure of parents to contribute financial and other support to the education of their children and resigning the responsibility to the Government (gavumenti etuyambe); the absence of government school inspectors and abdication of oversight by foundation bodies: have been some of the reasons that have resulted in intellectual kwashikor among rural folk. Nevertheless, the tide is turning, and rural folk have progressively addressed the bottlenecks that prevented them from becoming academic giants.

The Ankole diocesan education coordinator, the Rev. Can. Muhwezi Agasha, said the 2025 PLE results for schools founded by the Ankole Diocese indicate a remarkable improvement in general performance for the last 12 years.

He further said: “The overall percentage pass rate for candidates in Ankole Diocese-founded schools in PLE 2025 was 98.34%, which was better than in PLE 2024, at 97.91%.” It is interesting to note that while the national first-grade percentage pass rate was at 11.39%, Ankole Diocese-founded schools scored a first-grade percentage pass of 24.83%. While the national PLE failure rate was at 9.5% with 77,080 pupils failing, the Ankole Diocese failure rate was at 1.64%, with only 123 pupils failing.

The Rev. Can. Agasha concluded his analysis by saying: “Despite the unique conditions pupils in rural schools go through, they have continued to compete favourably with their counterparts in urban schools.”

In his report, he points out that seven schools with the highest percentage of candidates in Division One were from district local governments, while only three were from the city. The icing on the cake is the summation, thus: “Consistent improved performance is noticed in several rural schools, where there has been positive reception to sensitisation of the stakeholders, diocesan oversight, government and diocesan school inspection and support.”

It seems the resurgence of rural schools in improving academic performance has coincided with the heightened strangulation of mostly urban schools, thus the projected complaint about rural schools outcompeting them.

How else can you explain, for example, school X scoring 99 4s in one year, four 4s the following year and subsequently no pupils scoring an aggregate 4? Similarly, hypothetically, how do you statistically explain school Y, which, say in PLE 2025, had all its 150 pupils not only passing in grade one but having all candidates scoring aggregates of 4 to 8?

This is perhaps where Minister Kaducu’s investigation should query why such abnormal results are often posted in urban schools. In rural areas, the majority of schools’ performance can stand the litmus test of a normal curve distribution, where pupils score aggregates of four to even 20.

The writer is an associate professor of religious education, chancellor of Bishop Stuart University, former dean of the Faculty of Education and Arts at Uganda Christian University and former deputy headteacher of Ntare School and Kibubura Girls’ SS