Kampala Parents teachers’ strike: A call for introspection

I have so far dedicated 21 years of my life to full time and active leadership to the provision of quality education in our country. Through leadership, research, advocacy and advisory insights rendered to both the technical and political leaders of the sector, I can say actors in the private sector of education need to read sector laws carefully, implement them to the letter and also hire teachers who are professionally trained, experienced and grounded to advise them, if they are non-teacher investors. 

It is also important that after hiring them, they should invest in listening to them carefully to implement their strategies and actions. This is similar to the patient / doctor interface in processes of diagnosis, treatment and review interactions.

So, having teachers demand better pay calls for a deeper reflection, aware that often times business interests can overshadow professionalism or take it to the slaughter house.

To avoid this, school proprietors should follow the law, protect the voices of reason to address challenges in schools and offer protection to individual teachers and not to suffocate them. Continuous social dialogue should be the cure .

It is true that there isn’t any education system that is better than the quality of its teachers. As directors of schools, we need to know that there is no school that is better than the quality of its teachers, even though a school has five-star hotel type of buildings. 

A good school is defined by a cadre of quality teachers with a rich, tested, tried and trusted school culture built on a value system with mutual respect, collective responsibility, humility, learner-centredness and non-discrimination. It is not the social amenities it offers. Period! 

A school culture, therefore, must be built overtime to last beyond generations. This, again, is the same reason I challenge Pentecostal leaders to pick lessons to emulate the missionaries in establishing strong education institutions resonating with the same value system they preached then and now.

In fact, if the late Gladys Wambuzi, founder of Green Hill Academy schools, the late Prof Lawrence Mukiibi, founder of St Lawrence Schools were to be alive, they would wonder whether their former boss and pioneer of quality private primary education in Uganda would have let his teachers to demonstrate if he still owned the school anyway.

Schools should be protected by their key stakeholders, the parents, teachers and learners.

Directors need to be humble to offer services as servants and not as lords for a school is not a shop. As a matter of standard operating procedures for schools, there has to be a distinction between a school management committee and a board of directors. 

As a non-negotiable, teachers, old students representatives of a school, as by law established, form the oversight organ of a school.

In offering the best services to the elite and moneyed folks it serves; the oversight organ should be the first to introspect. Parents, teachers and learners of the school should know the chairperson of the school management committee, as well as other members of the school oversight organ for redress. Since the school management committee is not the senior management committee, it is critical that school owners and managers follow the law, the (Education Pre-Primary, Primary and Post Primary) Act, 2008 to the letter to ensure protection for the school and its stakeholders.

The writer, Patrick Kaboyo, is the National Secretary, Federation of Non-state Education Institutions.