Schools reject 50,000 pupils over bad choices

A total of 49,617 pupils who passed last year’s Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE) did not secure places during the Senior One selection that ended yesterday due to poor choices of schools.
The Ministry of Education allocated S1 vacancies to 549,976 candidates in both private and government-aided institutions.
This means of the 599,593 candidates that the Uganda National Examinations Board (Uneb) declared to have passed the 2018 PLE exams, at least 49,617 of them have not been admitted.
A total, 659, 633 candidates sat for the 2018 PLE.
For instance, St Peter’s SS Nsambya, which received applications from 1,372 primary leavers, took in only 180 students, leaving out 173 who had applied to join the school. About 1,019 names were on their selling list.
Mr Joseph Kiwanuka, the student dean at St Peter’s SS Nsambya, explained that the majority of the candidates who were left floating after the selection are those who had poor choices of schools to join.
He said some pupils opted for schools that government had categorised in the same grade.
“If you look at the list of non-selected students, you find the pupils opted for Gayaza High School as their first choice and second was Mt St Mary’s Namagunga, and third Nabisunsa Girls School. If the first school doesn’t take you, it is unlikely that the other second and third choice schools will take such a child even if they performed well,” Mr Kiwanuka said.
At St Peter’s SS Nsambya, he added, they expanded their infrastructure to increase their intake to 400 students for Senior One, but still many candidates who would applied to study there were left out even when they had qualified.
He advised pupils and their parents to learn to rate their abilities and apply for schools starting with the most competitive and scale down to the least competitive institutions to avoid being left stranded.
Nonetheless, he said, had such pupils visited those respective schools of their choices, there is an opportunity to be considered. Namilyango College officials told Saturday Monitor that they had 1,054 applicants but can only accommodate 200 of the students.
While opening the selection exercise on Thursday, the State Minister for Primary Education, Ms Rosemary Seninde, pleaded with school administrators to ensure that they admit all students who passed and approach them to join their institutions. She was speaking on behalf of Ms Janet Museveni, the minister of Education. She said the government was spending millions of dollars in building and upgrading school infrastructure and urged the school administrators to ensure that teaching and learning takes place to improve the quality of education.
“The important challenge facing us in the coming years is allocating and spending funds available to ensure we are optimising this huge investment. Everything is changing at a pace that we have never experienced before. Learning is the answer to surviving and thriving in this new environment. …we must never be satisfied with our achievements if in the process we leave some of our boys and girls behind. We must work hard towards ensuring there is no child left behind,” Ms Seninde said.
While she appreciated the head teachers who are doing their supervisory job well, she added that there were those who are betraying the country.
“In this journey, there are head teachers that we can rely on to confidently do their work well. There are also those who have continued to remain complacent and are not making the effort to bring about school improvement. It is important that this year we take a hard look at this category of school heads and see how to address this problem,” Ms Seninde explained.
Government announced during the release of PLE results that Senior Ones would report in their respective schools on February 18.