Scarcity of kindergarten teachers is a growing concern

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This new year spells the beginning of a new phase in education, especially for little ones who will be joining kindergarten. Parents are most probably combing kindergartens in a quest for the most suitable one for their gems, and for some, the cost does not matter.

However, unbeknownst to them, there is a scarcity of qualified kindergarten teachers in the country. Some blame the scarcity on the government's National Teacher Policy, 2019, which states that all teachers should have a minimum of a bachelor's degree to practice. Yet many teachers may find the pursuit of a degree too expensive to afford, in both urban and rural areas.

According to a Ministry of Finance report, one of the causes for the scarcity is the fact that kindergarten is a private-run venture that leaves the majority of Ugandan children out because of the question of affordability.

According to Kitandwa of Mother Manjeri Primary School, the scarcity of kindergarten teachers is a concern. His school has a kindergarten section.

He reckons that the few training institutions for kindergarten compared to the need for teachers could be the cause.

“Yes, they are hard to find. I don’t know, but I think generally that we have few training kindergarten institutions. Yet the growing rate of kindergartens is growing higher than the teachers.”

Kitandwa notes that although there is a framework or syllabus for kindergartens since it was centralized, the issue of different backgrounds comes into play.

“The framework was centralized, but these kids come from different backgrounds, and all of us have ended up handling them differently. Yet we don’t have a central teacher we can call a kindergarten teacher.”

To elaborate further, he adds: “A primary teacher from here [Mother Manjeri Primary School] can go to Shimoni [Demonstration School] and excel because of the centralized training, but a kindergarten teacher may not.”

The scarcity of kindergarten teachers is a concern because it is a harbinger of children’s performance in primary school.

The 2013 UNICEF research puts the point clearly by showing the benefit-to-cost ratio for pre-primary is 1.6, which implies that money invested in pre-primary education has a return of 60% in terms of future incomes, productivity, and health.