What will happen if govt finally closes some schools?

A few weeks ago, the media in the country was awash with a list of schools that were to be closed before the commencement of term one. This followed a directive issued by the Ministry of Education for the closure of a number of schools across the country that are allegedly operating without licenses.

Earlier, the Ministry of Education had issued a directive stopping schools from demanding prohibitive school requirements besides tuition. However, because of poor enforcement, some schools ignored the directive while other schools circumvented it through tuition increment. Either way, the burden remains on the parent given that private schools are driven by profit maximisation.

On the face of it, such directives would be a welcome relief. Licensing is one form of a regulatory mechanism through which government promotes quality assurance. In the education sector that offers a critical service, quality assurance is very critical. Yet, such a planned mass closure is oblivious of the other challenges the education sector is encumbered with or the problem such an action can create.
First, it is important to note that the timing of school closure was ill-conceived.

The Education ministry ought to know that closing a school at the beginning, rather than end of a school term, significantly affects the innocent parents and pupils. Some of these parents pay fees in advance and finding an alternative school in such circumstances is hard.

Poor timing of the planned school closure has been aggravated by the incoherent communication from the line ministry. For example, whereas the Minister of State for Education was insisting on closure, a senior official in the ministry is on record to have given prior assurances that schools, including Bridge Academy, which had duly submitted their applications and satisfied other requirements for licensing, would not be closed. The ministry attributed the delay in processing the licences to a backlog of assessments for hundreds of schools. Government bureaucracy and related inefficiencies can hardly be a fault of the compliant schools unless other factors are at play.

The case of Bridge Academy Schools is a very curious one. Bridge Academy runs more than 60 schools across the country with more than a thousand pupils. The academy posted very good performances in the PLE released recently.

It posted way better than the national average performance. The schools target hard-to-reach areas and largely poor households. It sets up an infrastructure system in all its schools that guarantees very affordable yet quality education. Their education model has picked momentum in Uganda and across Africa because the model is appropriately tailored for low income earners that form a large crust of our societies.

So why would such a high performing franchise be closed? What happens to the hundreds of pupils from mainly poor households that the Bridge schools had now given hope of a bright future just like those of King’s College Budo and Mt St Mary’s Namagunga, but whose fate is now unknown?

My work as an education consultant in eastern Uganda has prove to me one thing - that a number of government schools across the country lack minimum infrastructure. Some schools have dilapidated structures that are on the verge of collapse. Worse still, most of these schools lack teachers and other essential school requirements due to budgetary constraints.

Such schools cannot, therefore, be a viable alternative for pupils affected by closure yet a number of private schools are out of reach for thousands of these pupils. The implication is that the Ministry of Education could render thousands of pupils without schools.

Government needs to strengthen its regulatory framework over schools to guarantee compliance to standards and related benchmarks. This will help to protect both pupils and their parents from rushed and most often unfair decisions like school closures.

Most importantly, such a framework helps to create a clear roadmap that compliant schools like Bridge Academy and others should follow so as to formalise their operations contrary to the status quo that is unfair to these schools.

Mr Oramire is a lawyer and an educationist.
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