Pre-primary education: A sector unregulated

It was a chilly and hazy morning. Seven-year-old Francis Agula was out of breath when he made his way into the Nwoya Church of Uganda Primary School compound.

He had walked 9.6 kilometres from home to school, snaking through thickets, in his trademark market-day pair of shorts and shirt, which served as his Sunday best.

“Put your hand across your head to touch the ear on the other side,” Agula recollects headmaster Simon Opiti bellowing, during a 1965 Primary One enrolment interview.

He touched his ear lobe and the head teacher’s verdict was: “You have passed the interview, go and register and begin attending Primary One class.”
Mr Agula, who retired in March, this year, after years of serving as commissioner for secondary education, was lucky to be enrolled because many prospective pupils in his group were eliminated as their hands couldn’t reach the ear on the opposite side.

“Most of those children who were disqualified went back home happy; we did not like being at school because it meant missing play, hunting, et cetera,” says Agula, “It was instead the parents who complained bitterly when their children were rejected.”
Some eliminated pupils never returned to school, even after coming of age, the retired commissioner recalls.

Prerequisites for nursery entry
School administrators then presumed that only children aged six and above should be in school, a sharp contrast to today’s practice where three-year-old children are legally required to enrol in nursery schools under a revised 2008 Education (pre-primary, primary and post-primary) Act.

The legislation, enacted on August 26, 2008, specifies pre-primary (referred in government policy guideline as early childhood development), primary; post-primary; and, tertiary or university education and training as mandatory tiers of formal education in Uganda.

This means it is now illegal for one to progress to the next level without completing a previous stage. In practice, someone who for instance skips pre-primary or any other level could in future find themselves on the wrong side of the law.

So what really is pre-primary education? According to education technocrats, it is more than simply teaching children facts and figures. It is the early stimulation of a child’s brain to provide social and learning advancements throughout life. It could be provided at home, a tailored community or any other institutional centre.

“Such care does not produce a self-centred child, but rather a child who trusts, is curious, strives to learn new things and is skilful in social interaction,” reads the government’s guidelines on the largely urban erudition.

More than day cares
Ugandans often confuse daycare centres, operated more or less as alternative homes for moulding the formative character of babies a few months to two years, with a nursery education meant for children between three and eight years, being inducted into formal education.
The confusion is partly because many institutions, especially in towns, simultaneously run daycare and nursery sections.

Kampala Happitots Pre-school and Day Care on Clement Road in the city centre is one such institution. Its director Muriel Baingana, a specialist in early child education (ECD), says she founded the school in 1995 because as a grandmother, she loves giving quality care to babies and “I saw the challenges a working mother faced in bringing up children”. The arrangement was perceived as alien and not popular at the time, even though Kampala had a number of kindergartens in existence.

According to Baingana, her teachers offer good care for the babies and guarantee their safety. For instance, a teacher is always at hand early in the morning to receive the children when dropped, to monitor them throughout the day, to ensure gifts are not accepted or not to permit another person to pick up the child unless directly authorised by the parent/guardian duly registered with the school. This provides a relief to particularly working parents, since most work places in Uganda have no on-site provision for baby care, including for breast-feeding.

The lack of such places has led most women at the end of the three-month maternity leave to transfer, prematurely, care of a child to inexperienced and often teenage housemaids. Such parents keep restless at work over safety concerns of their babies, said Baingana whose school has three-month-old children among the 90.

The option, therefore, of having one’s child learn in a safe and good environment is one many parents are happy to take. According to the official curriculum, pre-primary children ought to learn how to relate with others in an acceptable way, interact, explore, know and use their environment, and take interest in personal care (hygiene, health and spiritual practices). They also ought to learn how to use mathematical concepts for day-to-day experience.

Another important learning aspect is language articulation. These early childhood development programmes are pathways that link a child’s early experiences to later learning and development, according to Unicef.

Uganda is one of 11 African countries that the UN agency assisted to develop national policies and guidelines on early childhood development as well as parenting programmes to “improve early childhood care among vulnerable families”. The draft 2013-2018 integrated early childhood development policy action plan, aimed at consolidating the fragmented intervention by various ministries, is yet to be presented for Cabinet approval, according to Gender minister Mary Karooro Okurut.

That said, both school and government officials hold a view that some parents use kindergartens to substitute their natural parenting role in a home environment, and care less what happens to their children when away. One school official, who asked not to be named, said a few daring mothers and fathers surrender babies to day care centres overnight to take out-of-town fun trips or go clubbing. Some wake up babies at 4am and drop them off at school by 6am or earlier. As such, in the parent’s dash to dodge Kampala’s characteristic traffic gridlock and be at work in time, the child is deprived of sleep.

“You cannot hide from your responsibility of parenting,” says Bridget Akatukwatsa, a co-director in a kindergarten in Kampala. “Whatever we do at school is to supplement what the parent does at home.”

Tough choices to be made
Former Education commissioner-turned-consultant Fagil Mandy adds to this view: “Marriages and homes are increasingly unstable; parents don’t know parenting. The question is whether to keep the child with parents who don’t know what to do or take them to people [at daycare centres and nursery schools] presumed to be more responsible and know better how to manage the children.”

In addition to the above problem, there is also no enforced coherent time table or curriculum for the daycare centres and nursery schools mushrooming in towns and the countryside. Each determines play facilities for the children, fees structure and time of opening and closing. Others operate illegally, with Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) records showing only 33 licenced nursery schools in the capital. (See list above)

The government’s own involvement in early childhood is a patchwork. It has policy guidelines and focal person officers in all districts and municipalities, but no money to run the system.
“Early childhood education remains an unfunded priority within the sector (Education ministry),” says Elizabeth Kisakye, the senior education officer in-charge of ECD teacher training. She adds: “It is our recommendation to have a full department for early childhood development in the Ministry of Education to avoid fragmentation of ECD service delivery.”

Kisakye’s lamentations show a government aware of its staggering obligation, but idling at a bureaucratic gridlock. For instance, there is no government institution training teachers as care givers at pre-primary. Neither is there a single kindergarten directly run by the government. Thus quality of early primary education is compromised from the source – inadequate or inappropriately-trained teachers.

In the 2014/15 Budget, the Education ministry did not assign any money for early childhood education, which in public it commits to promote.
As such, private individuals or firms, religious and non-governmental organisations run all of the country’s countless nursery schools where some give take-home assignments to the babies already fatigued by day-long engagement at school.
“The homeworks, tests and holiday packages in the current (pre-school) system make a child tired,” says Mandy, who in 1976 served as head teacher at Kitante Primary School in Kampala. “As a result, the child begins hating school instead of falling in love with it. This kills the development of the child.”

The government admits the mistake. In its early childhood development policy passed in October 2007, it is noted that: “Children have often been subjected to inappropriate written examinations in nursery schools as well as at Primary One level. This tends to make children lose interest in attending school and hence contributes to pre-mature drop-out…”

So why is nothing being done to reverse a counter-productive trend observed seven years ago? The government has no resources, Education minister Jessica Alupo said, and the liberalisation policy means the forces of demand and supply determine pricing, including in the education sector.
The government will be credited if it abolishes written examinations for pre-schools and implements new plans to pilot formal early childhood education in rural areas by opening up nursery schools attached to existing select public primary schools.

However, early child educator Betty Banyenzaki says primary schools, particularly private ones, should be stopped from simultaneously operating pre-primary section because they have limited space for out-door activities. Also, they prefer to take into to Primary One, only children from their own nursery sections, locking out thousands of otherwise eligible children produced by other early childhood centres.

Despite these challenges, many parents believe pre-school centres are institutions that benefit a child, more than harm it.
Susan Atim, a telecommunications company staffer, has had her two children go through nursery school, and speaks of enormous rewards.

“There are things our children cannot learn when they are alone at home, they think they are the only ones in the world, cannot share and need to go to school to learn to live with and among many people, which is the reality of life,” she said.
Atim says her young daughter was an introvert before school, but turned out to be social on graduation from Top Class.

It of course came with a cost. They had to fork out Shs550,000 per term and ensure, each week day during the school term, to drop the children off at and pick them up from school in central Kampala, about 10 kilometres from their home. Biscuits, juice and changing clothes as well as wet wipes had to be packed each day or alternatively deposited at school. Atim, however, believes the rewards are worth it.

Worth the sacrifice
The same applies to Chris Ocowun, a Total E&P Uganda public relations officer, who is one such parent. One of the rewards was when his three-year-old daughter in Baby Class at Little Harvard Nursery/Primary School in Gulu Town, northern Uganda, stunned them by singing the National Anthem.

He says: “I was so excited on June 29, 2014 when my little girl, Lynn Nimaro Blessings, sang for me and my lovely wife the first stanza of Uganda National Anthem. Good accounting for the money being spent on her fees, transport and feeding.”
Blessings’ up-country nursery school charges Shs380,000 in tuition per term, excluding an additional Shs150,000 on transport fare.
At the end of the day, in spite of prohibitive charges and a government unable to get its act together under the 2008 Education Act, stakeholders agree on the life-changing role of pre-primary education.

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