Transferring teachers offers no solution to poor performance – Tanga Odoi

The electoral commission chairperson for the National Resistance Movement (NRM) party, Dr Tanga Odoi has joined some concerned educationists to protest the unnecessary transfers of teachers in Tororo District.

He reasons that transfers cannot allow parents to monitor the performance of teachers since they can’t stay at the school for some reasonable period of time.

"I must say we the educationists in Tororo are concerned over the high failure rate that the district registered in the recently released Primary Leaving Examinations, but this cannot simply be addressed through the transfer of teachers," he said Tuesday while celebrating good performance of his former school, Kisoko Boys Primary School, which registered eight first grades.

“Teachers stabilise and focus on teaching when they know they will soon be transferred. The district should rather allocate resources to facilitate benchmarking among poor and best-performing schools so that they can learn from each other,” he suggested.

In the recently released PLE results, 2,306 out of 9,905 candidates in the district were ungraded.

Dr Tanga said there is no excuse that school administrators can give for continuously recording poor performances, with all the available opportunities and peace.

He wondered how schools with beautiful infrastructure, textbooks, trained teachers and government funding can fail to perform.

Kisoko Boys Primary School head teacher, Mr Geno Were Asaph, attributed the school's good performance to the old students who put in a lot of their efforts financially and could even visit the school to have interactions with both the teachers and pupils.

"In particular I want to thank Dr Tanga for sacrificing his resources to provide space for learning. He constructed two-storey building, contributed towards children's welfare and always visits to inspire learners," he said.

The Tororo District Education Officer, Mr Albert Odoi, said the transfer of teachers followed parents' complaints that some of the teachers were becoming unruly because of overstaying at one work station.

"We realised that some of the teachers had overstayed and had began forming cliques to fight head teachers and through school management committees, parents recommended for their transfers to bring in harmony and it’s what we did," he explained.