Mubende teachers to get less pay for absenteeism
Warned. A teacher conducts classes at Lulongo Primary School in Madudu Sub-county on Monday. PHOTO BY JOSEPHINE NNABBAALE
What you need to know:
- In 2018, a total of 4,549 candidates registered for PLE in Mubende District and out of these, 330 got first grade, 1,600 in second grades, 997 in third grade and 882 in fourth grade. Another 637 candidates were ungraded while 103 did not show up for the exams.
- In the previous year, the district registered 9,104 candidates and out of these, 321 candidates got first grade, 3,889 in second grade, 1,944 in third grade and 1,561 in fourth grade.
- A total of 1,145 candidates were ungraded while 244 did not sit for the exams.
Primary school teachers in Mubende District may suffer salary deductions starting this term if they continue to absent themselves from duty, the district education officer has said.
“All teachers who have made it a habit to abscond from duty without genuine reasons are going to face salary deductions with immediate effect. Some teachers are not regular at school and this made our children miss lessons,” Mr Benson Kayiwa said in an interview on Monday.
“We cannot just look on as children continue to fail exams while others are dropping out of school yet the teachers who are paid to teach them, have no time for them, ” he added.
Chronic absenteeism of teachers has always been blamed for poor performance of pupils in Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE) and school dropouts.
Mr Kayiwa said the district has put in place a system of tracking teachers’ attendance and at the end of every month, school inspectors will compile reports and submit them to his office.
“So, we are going to be calculating the number of days missed by the absent teacher and deduct that money from their monthly salaries,” Mr Kayiwa said.
The lowest paid primary teacher earns Shs270,000 per month.
Mr Kayiwa said the district has also come up with a strategy of reprimanding head teachers whose schools recorded many failures in PLE.
“We have already identified schools that did not get any first grades and therefore the head teachers will soon be invited to explain why this happened. They will also be issued with warning letters and also make commitment to improve academic standards at their schools,” he said.
Mr Kayiwa said they also plan to rejuvenate and strengthen the district head teachers association to enable them monitor and supervise classroom teachers.
However, some of the teachers who spoke to Daily Monitor on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, said most of the schools in the district lack decent accommodation and they rent houses in town centres far away from their work stations .
“We walk long distances from where we reside since we lack proper means of transport. We sometime fail to report at school, especially when it rains,” a teacher said.
The district has a total of 439 primary schools of which 299 are government-aided.
Some of the primary schools without accommodation include Kanyogoga, Biwalwe and Nabibungo.
According to the survey conducted between March and April 2014 in 699 secondary schools across the country, none of the schools visited registered 100 per cent attendance of head teachers, classroom teachers and students.
The report indicates that although teaching and learning takes place in some schools, the number of lessons taught is inadequate compared to set timetables.
Another recent survey by the Ministry of Education indicated that 4 per cent or about 7,480 teachers in public primary schools quit work annually mainly due to poor remuneration. This trend is said to be compromising the quality of education in the country.
Although some die, abscond or retire, a large number of teachers quit for better paying jobs, especially in South Africa, Rwanda and Bostwana.
To curb teacher absenteeism, the former Education minister, Ms Namirembe Bitamazire, had proposed that those perennially absent be paid basing on the number of days they teach.
