Sports to become compulsory subject

Sep 29, 2009

IN a move to improve sports in the country, the Government will train over 3,000 sports teachers. The teachers will advance the Government’s target of making sports a compulsory subject in post primary schools starting next year.

By Norman Katende

IN a move to improve sports in the country, the Government will train over 3,000 sports teachers. The teachers will advance the Government’s target of making sports a compulsory subject in post primary schools starting next year.

Charles Bakkabulindi, the sports State minister, revealed this recently while welcoming German sports expert, Gunter Lange in a ceremony held at the Germany ambassador Reinhard Buchholz’s residence in Kololo.

Lange is in the country on a four-year development programme courtesy of the Germany government. The programme aims at building human resource for sports teachers in secondary schools.
Bakkabulindi said: “The ministry has already approved the programme. Sports is going to become a subject like Biology or Mathematics.”

“Our idea is to include it in primary schools so that we help the brains to become more active. We are also going to identify schools of excellence which will be sports biased.”

Lange said the removal of sports from the education curriculum is part of the reason why the country lags behind in various sport competitions.

He said training a fully equipped teacher to handle sports sciences needs about four years, but they were going to do it in phases.

“A number of teachers are graduating every year and those are the ones we are targeting. We shall include the basic sports training knowledge in their syllabus. We will do this by organising two-week courses for them to grasp the basics in sports development. We shall then go on improving on that, as we teach others through the normal process.”

Dan Tamwesigire, sports commissioner said they were working on a syllabus with the help of the curriculum department, which was expected to be ready in a month’s time.

Buchholz said the training programme was just a continuation of Germany’s long term cooperation with Uganda.

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