Kamuli, Buyende districts post improved PLE results

Kamuli and Buyende are some of the districts which have posted improved performance in the recently released Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE) results.

With the education sector affected for two years by the Covid-19 global pandemic, candidates were expected to post poor results; however, they have proved sceptics wrong.

As per the results, Kamuli Municipality got 517 first grades, Kamuli main got 621, Buyende 224 and Kaliro 291, reducing the failures to 214, 1834, 711 and 964 respectively.

Mr Joseph Waibi, the Kamuli district education officer, said there was good improvement in both completion and passing last year.

“This time, the girls who were expected to have dropped out, gotten pregnant and married off during the two-year Covid-19 period surprisingly returned to school, sat for PLE and have passed,” he said.

Mr Waibi said Kamuli District registered 621 first grades, up from 355 and reduced failures from 2,191 to 1,834.

“We have “nomadic pupils” who attend classes as and when they want, and change schools almost every month while others registered, dropped out to cut sugarcane, fish or get married, only to resurface to sit for the exams,” he said.

Concerted efforts

In the wake of the poor performance, the education stakeholders this time had collective efforts drawing in political will, and enforced attendance and enrolment.

International Development Institute (IDI) Uganda injected millions into boosting school feeding, desks and infrastructure, let alone retraining teachers in the new abridged curriculum, and performance-based facilitation.

“Development partners like IDI Uganda, Plan International, RAKEI and Cordaid came in to boost education in our area, leading to increased enrolment, improved retention and now improved performance to which we are grateful,” Mr Waibi added.

Mr Michael Kanaku, the Buyende district chairperson, said they called in an education performance review stakeholders’ dialogue, which hunted for both parents and learners who were frustrating the sector and decided on community work as punishment.

 “Districts focused on staff housing, support supervision and mini-zonal education improvement barazas after realising that most Parents’ Teachers’ Association (PTA) and school management committees (SMCs) were elected to manage the head teacher, not school and also some motivation incentives were provided for,” he explained.

Mr Nathan Muwanika, the director of East View Junior School, Musita in Mayuge District, whose school registered a 100 per cent pass rate, including an aggregate four, attributed the success to a policy to build capacity of their teachers.

“We have a trend of paying our teachers on time to motivate them, and for the past five years, we have been setting targets so that our teachers, parents and pupils know what we want,” he said.

Mr Muwanika dispelled the belief that the automatic promotion of learners due to the Covid-19 pandemic was to blame for poor performance in some schools, saying: “I have been carrying out automatic promotions but the pupils have been passing.”

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