Rectify gaps in selection process

Over the last few years, Uganda has embarked on education reforms including the much talked about teacher reforms and lower level secondary school curriculum among others.
I commend the Minister of Education and Sports (MOES), her team of ministers and top technocrats for spearheading these reforms that will fundamentally change the education sector if policy implementation goes as planned.
However, there are still many issues to fix one of them being the way the national secondary school selection exercise for students joining Senior One and Senior Five conducted by the Ministry of Education and Sports (MOES).
Parents invest heavily in the education of their children so they can be admitted to the best schools in the country - those that are motivating, well equipped, easily accessible, offer challenging learning environment and with reputed academic records and have quality peer groups.
Parents and students in Uganda highly value graduating from traditional schools as evidenced by the prices they are willing to pay and prestige associated with their graduates.
According to the placement information guide for primary school leavers 2017 Edition, for the secondary school option, the candidate makes four choices of his/her order of interest. Popular schools always have a large number of applicants hence the competition for them is also acute and the places are usually filled up with the candidates of Division 1 sometimes with aggregates 4 - 5. Change of choices is not accepted once the entry forms have been submitted for processing by the admission Committee of the MOES. If a student is unhappy with their placement they can apply directly to an alternative school and their admission is at the discretion of the head of the school, provided that there are available places. A place in a school is open to a direct applicant only if a student who was admitted to the school does not turn up at the start of the school year.
But there are serious challenges with the selection exercise by the MOES. All schools are supposed to be given 100 percent of students to be admitted in a bid to ensure control quality and that students join schools on merit selected students based on their performance and choices.
Accordingly, the number of students to be sent to government schools is determined by the number students and of classrooms at each school. The statistics department is supposed to give the MOES the number of classrooms and the capacity the school has in which they place the number each school needs. However, in practice things are really different. Most top schools must be telling lies in relation to the number of students they can accommodate or the MOES lack up-to-date data on the capacity of the schools.
The MOES can visit the top schools in the country immediately after the selection exercise to verify what I am talking about.
This anomaly has bred corruption in almost all top schools in the country. Some of these schools are even fleecing parents with the so called application and commitment fees ranging from shs100, 000 to Shs600, 000.
The children of those paying this money ordinarily would have been admitted to their schools of first choice if at all they were transparent and admitted the right numbers. There are also numerous reports of head teachers taking huge bribes and allowing students with weak grades in their schools which the MOES has failed to crack down for a long time. Why should a top scorer be denied a vacancy in a top school and later the same school admits those with grades lower?
It is absurd that the Education Management Information Systems (EMIS) conceived to enable MOES headquarters to collect, capture and process data to generate management information that could help in planning and evidence-based decision making at all levels does not seem to be helping as expected. It is possible they don’t have updated data for institutions, teachers, pupils, infrastructures, finances, etc. I also wonder whether information from the schools census is used for the right purposes.
I call upon the MOES to follow up on these issues so the national selection exercise is transparent and free from corrupt tendencies that are tending unfortunately to become a norm in our schools. If the public continues to believe that the provision of quality schooling favours one social group and generally if the school system cannot be trusted, it may detract from a nation’s sense of social cohesion, the principal ingredient of all successful modern societies. For schools to educate the corruption fighters, they need to be free from corruption and fraud themselves.
The writer is the Dean Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences & Associate Professor – Department of Governance, Kabale University