Kibuku P6 pupils forced to repeat over poor performance

Pupils, who had been promoted to Primary Seven despite poor performance in government-aided primary schools, in Kibuku District have been forced to repeat.

This is contrary to the government’s policy of automatic promotion under the Universal Primary Education (UPE) programme.

However, leaders told Daily Monitor that the move is intended to improve the academic performance of pupils after the district registered the highest failure rates, which stood at 31.5 percent in the just released the 2023 Primary Leaving Examinations.

The district registered 5,151 PLE candidates in 2023. Of these, 76 passed.

The Secretary for Health and Education Committee  of the Kibuku  District Council, Mr Augustine Moleka Majanga, said all those pupils who had been automatically promoted to Primary Seven had failed to score more than 200 marks in the four subjects and have been asked to repeat Primary Six.

“It is becoming disastrous to allow all pupils who just scored a total of 35-40 marks in all the subjects to proceed to Primary Seven. This is like promoting failures,” Mr Majanga said.

He added: “The high failure numbers registered in the just released PLE is a clear indicator that mass-class promotion policy was the main driver for poor performance in the national exams. The automatic promotion policy has been disastrous because most of the pupils in Primary Six cannot read and write and yet they have to sit for national examination like other urban schools.”

Mr Majanga made the remarks while meeting parents and learners at respective schools in the district at the weekend.

While releasing the 2023 PLE results last month, the Executive Director of Uganda National Examinations Board (Uneb), Mr Dan Odongo, said districts with high failure rates included Kibuku [31.5 percent], Madi Okollo [31.5 percent], Dokolo (28.9 percent), Kween (28.4 percent) and Namisindwa (28.9 percent).

According to Uneb, Kibuku District’s PLE failure rate stood at 31.5 percent, which is higher than the country’s failure rate of 10.4 percent. Of the 88,269 learners who failed PLE, 1,622 came from Kibuku District.

The Kibuku District Education Officer [DEO], Mr Christopher Wamika, said: “The extremely poor results are mainly compounded by many factors, and among them is the negative perception of parents and also lack of political will to support the education department,” Mr Wamika said.

He said following the poor results posted in the district, the department has come up with several innovations among which is to subject Primary Seven pupils to assessment tests before they are promoted.

“It is from these assessments that pupils would either be advised to repeat Primary Six class in case they fail to meet the pass mark,” he said.

Mr Samuel Kyaide, the chairperson of the Uganda National Teachers’ Union (Unatu) in Kibuku, said :“Government should increase funding to UPE schools if we want to improve on performance.” 

The government currrently allocates  Shs17,000 annually for every child under UPE, which Dr Hamis Mugendawala, manager of policy research and innovation at the National Planning Authority (NPA), last year said should be increased to about Shs 63,546 per child at the primary level, to among others,  enhance learning outcomes.

Views on automatic promotions

Mr Majanga said the government should review its policy of mass class automatic promotion under UPE arguing that the policy has contributed to poor performance, especially in the rural districts.

Automatic promotion was adopted in 2005 as part of a broader national education strategy aimed at enhancing internal efficiency in basic education to increase retention and address issues of school dropout and repetition, which were causing substantial costs to the government

A 2017 report titled “Governance of UPE in Uganda and its implications for National Development” commissioned by Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment (ACODE), highlighted that automatic promotions don’t give weak learners a chance to improve or challenge themselves.

The report  also said evaluation, which is a fundamental aspect of learning, is compromised by automatic promotions. 

On January 25, during the release of the PLE results, Ms Janet Museveni, the minister of Education and Sports and First Lady,  said the government would scrap the automatic promotion policy to reduce the number of ungraded candidates in the national exams.  

She noted that the policy could be fuelling the high number of candidates who are graded under Division U, which means they do not meet the minimum skills and competencies.