Let’s support school twinning programmes

Our story of April 4 titled, “Schools collaborate to attain quality education”, highlighted the gem that is school twinning as one of the best practices to ensure quality and holistic education. 

School twinning is where schools of different backgrounds share practices and resources, learning how quality performance can be attained and helping to solve school organisation challenges.

In the story, we interviewed a number of education sector players who have experienced the merits of the programme.

One of them, Mr Simon Akandonda, a retired primary school teacher, said school twinning programmes create an environment for best practices not only in academics but in other social transformative programmes such as skills and management practices.

Mr Andrew Bebuze, an inspector of schools in Mbarara, added that even school management committees can be involved to learn best management practices such as managing human resource, bringing parents on board to support schools and learners.

Mr Nathan Mugume, the head teacher of Mbarara Junior School, says through the twinning programme they have been able to improve the performance of some poorly performing schools.

The testimonies about how this programme has improved performance of both the learners and the school administrations are endless.

In a bid to improve our education sector not only for those schools that are known high performers but for everyone else in the country, this kind of project is bound to produce results if given the support needed for it to thrive and be embraced by many. This helps to pull up especially the poor performers and open them up to a whole new world of brilliant ideas.

 Of course, there are those who might consider it detrimental to their competitive edge and might look at it as giving away trade secrets, but is it really? Is it not enabling your peers to rise to the occasion so that you can have worthy competition?

Obviously, it goes without saying that this is no magic bullet to improve performance in various schools but it definitely is a good addition to the numerous efforts and projects being taken to improve our education sector. We implore the sector stakeholders to give the twinning project all the support it needs and encourage more schools to join in. We can improve our education sector one initiative at a time.