The Uganda National Teachers’ Union (UNATU) has blasted the Kampala Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago’s crippled idea of rolling out the Universal Primary Education (UPE) a government program whose main mandate is to provide free education to the low income earners in the country.
While addressing journalists at city hall in Kampala on Tuesday 31st January 2023, Lukwago alleged that poor performance in the schools under UPE program is as a result of under-funding, stating that it should be phased out to enhance the performance of the once best schools in Kampala.
However, Mr. Filbert Baguma the secretary general of UNATU is disappointed by Lord Mayor’s baseless idea retaliating that the proposal will instead widen the education gap between the rich and poor in Kampala and countrywide.
“We have areas of the urban poor so if you do away with UPE and USE then you will have disadvantaged a very big number of Ugandans,” he said.
He also revealed that getting 4 aggregates in PLE is not the only basis on which good performance is measured, reminding Lukwago that there is a situation where a learner scores good grades but fails to perform in secondary as expected.
“But there are those who even get 4 aggregates but when they cross to senior one they don’t qualify to go to senior two because some schools are tempted to cheat exams as many focus on just scoring superb grades which is illegal,” Mr. Baguma said.
According to UNEB statistics, Kampala district has 79 public schools and from the 2022 PLE results these schools had a total number of 38,105 candidates of which 17,529 were males and 20,576 females.
Statistics show that 12,896 (34.4%) passed in the first division, 17,402 (46.4%) in the second division, 3,451 (9.2%) in division three, 2,426 (6.5%) in fourth division, 1,333 (3.5%) were ungraded and 597 (1.6%) had their results cancelled.
According to UNEB, the number of candidates who passed with first grades in 2022, increased from 26.3% to 34.4 percent.
In general, according to UNEB 832,654 pupils sat for exams from 14,691 school centers in 2022 which is higher than the 749,761 in 2020.
And out of 832,654 candidates at least 714,702 passed the 2022 examinations as compared to the 659,910 of 2020.
