How teaching has evolved since Uganda's colonial times

In the wake of Uganda’s newly gained freedom from colonial rule, among things government sought to get a grip on was the country’s education system. Education would be a tool to create a new brand of Ugandans able to solve their own affairs, but also fill the empty job slots in the country.
As evidenced in the Castle Education Commission of 1963, several education reforms were made. The primary school course would last seven instead of the six years, while the junior secondary section of two years was abolished.

Farm schools, rural trade schools, home craft centres and the secondary modem schools, established by colonial rulers were fledged into academic secondary schools with an Ordinary Level to last four years and the Advanced Level for two years.

Later, university would open but for the meantime, Teacher Training Colleges (TTCs) with a number of changes were to help Uganda achieve this education dream. This was followed by a tremendous increase in school enrolment, especially at secondary level.
Nonetheless, in 1987, Uganda experienced yet another wave of education reforms spearheaded by the National Education Policy Review Commission under the chairmanship of Prof Senteza Kajubi, which proposed some drastic changes.
Primary school education was changed to eight years, with lower primary (one to four) taught in the mother tongue of the area, and upper primary (five to eight) in the English language, with emphasis on practical subjects.

General secondary schools offering a course of three years, as well as comprehensive secondary schools offering a multi-purpose curriculum of both academic and vocational subjects for three years, were some of the other changes.
The rationale was that students who would graduate from these comprehensive secondary schools and do not continue into the next stages, would be able to employ themselves usefully or be employed by other people.

In 1997, Universal Primary Education was introduced and that way, Uganda set itself on the road to popularising education.
Today, the structure of formal education, which is no different from that inherited from the colonial government, has non-compulsory pre-primary phase for early childhood development, seven years of primary education, four years of lower secondary, followed by two years of advanced secondary education and after, tertiary and university education.

Curriculum
Although the Senteza Kajubi Commission tried to make education more practical, introducing subjects such as agriculture, woodwork, metal-work, technical drawing and secretarial courses in some secondary schools, it did little in changing the very nature of the colonial curriculum.

As Christopher Muganga, the head of curricular development for secondary schools at the National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC) notes, there have only been updates in the curriculum.
“Updates that we brand into new subjects or topics within subjects, but the principals have remained the same as those in colonial times. With the new lower secondary curriculum, it was an opportunity for us to write our own curriculum, and it is ready. We are just waiting for the powers that be to launch it. We shall also be training the implementers of this curriculum in a series of trainings for school heads, director of studies,” Mr Muganga says.
The trainings are hoped to start late this month to December holidays.

Teacher pay and status
After independence, there was a need to create a unified teaching service and to accord the teachers the same status as civil servants and it goes without saying that teacher pay has always been an issue. Although teachers formed an association - Uganda Teachers Union - to advocate for their welfare, its first call for teachers to strike left it weak, divided, and by 1970, it had died a natural death.
Over the following years, negotiations between government and teachers for more reasonable wages/salaries ensued and still linger under the leadership of the Uganda National Teacher’s Union (Unatu) even after staging a series of sit-down strikes.

“Teachers haven’t reached a salary that can sustain them as they do their work and as a result of stress, there are high death rates among teachers not to mention teacher stability is also affected,” Filbert Baguma, the general secretary of the union, says.
According to statistics by Unatu, Uganda has 135,650 primary school teachers and 32,293 secondary school teachers, 140,000 of which are members of Unatu.

Previously, government provided housing for teachers but today, Baguma notes that only five per cent of teachers have housing and so, the rest have to commute long distance to schools, with no allowances but a meager consolidated salary. Although government recently rolled out a new salary structure that is expected to come into effect at the end of October, Unatu believes that government has to look into the general welfare of teachers.

This year, the theme of World Teacher’s Day is: ‘Young teachers, the future of the profession.’
“However, government has to devise means of attracting young teachers into the profession. Young people look at teaching as a last option because it is one of the less paying professions,” Rehema Nakandi, a secondary school teacher, notes.
Voicing the same concerns, Baguma calls upon teachers to fight for their pay in terms of getting solutions to challenges they face every day.

Teacher training and quality
Without controversy, there is no such thing as quality education without quality teachers. With a limited number of teachers after independence, Uganda further relied on foreign expatriates to provide teaching services.
These came under different schemes such as the Peace Corps and Volunteer Service Overseas, among other groups to allow Uganda time to train its own teachers.

In her 38 years of teaching and teacher training, Sarah Nantono Bunoti, a teacher trainer at Kyambogo University, says she has witnessed a lot of changes in teacher training.
She recalls that at first, there were vernacular teachers, who needed no qualifications. With time, grades were introduced when; after primary school, one would become a Grade Two teacher.

“You needed to have passed Primary Leaving Examinations and excelled with a first grade. You would then spend four years at college to become a teacher,” she explains.
To become a Grade Three teacher, one needed to have sat Ordinary Level and passed all the eight subjects and then train for two years.
Grade four was abolished and there remained Grade Five, which one would do after finishing Advanced Level.

“To improve the quality of teachers, Grade Two teachers were phased out in 1984. There only remained Grade Three and Grade Five teachers. One would join a National Teacher’s College and become a diploma holder in primary education or after Advanced Level, join university to become a graduate secondary school teacher,” she says.
Although one would become a teacher trainer in a Primary Teacher’s College (PTC) with a diploma, Kyambogo University, in 2008, abolished this. One needed to be a degree holder to become a teacher trainer, thus introducing a Bachelor of Teacher Education.

Bunoti adds that two aspects in teacher training remain crucial: time in college, and school practice. Furthermore, teachers can upgrade.
“Take myself, for example. I was a Grade Three teacher and I have upgraded to becoming a university lecturer and many teachers have done that. In-service training has opened the door for many teachers to upgrade,” she says.

Evolved
Ms Rose Kuloba, the deputy head teacher of Manjasi High School, Tororo believes that teaching has evolved since 1994, when she begun her teaching career.
“There is more pressure on teachers to perform. Teachers are held more accountable than they did years ago. That, and the struggle to survive because of the little pay to teachers have changed the teaching incredibly,” she notes.

At a teacher – student level, the relationship between the two is better than it was, she believes – not with the high numbers of students in boarding school.
“The teacher interacts with students above the academic level now to a more personal and parental level and in socialising the students. Actually, some students trust and believe in their teachers more than they do their parents,” Ms Kuloba says.