Lukwago calls for abolition of UPE in the city

Kampala Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago has expressed his disappointment with the declining standards and poor performance of public primary schools in Kampala, calling for reform in the education system.

He urged the central government to consider ending Universal Primary Education (UPE) in the city, as it has negatively impacted the quality of education offered in schools under the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA).

Addressing a press conference at City Hall, Lukwago expressed his dismay with the performance of the 79 public schools in the recently released PLE results, observing that of the 38105 candidates none scored aggregate 4, with about 5000 pupils categorised as having failed deeming their hope of progressing with education.

Lukwago believes that the presence of free education may have caused poor performance of government primary schools within Kampala.

"UPE has been piloted for so long and government has failed to make meaningful investment in this critical sector resulting in to near collapse of hitherto good public schools" he said, adding that government should swallow the bitter pill and inevitably revert back to the earlier status quo the challenges therein notwithstanding, at least for Kampala

Lukwago said that the continued deterioration of education standards in public schools in the city is largely due to underfunding by the central government.

He explained that a child is allocated a paltry Shs 9,300 per year in comparison to countries like Kenya, South Africa, Britain and Norway wondering how children are expected to compete regionally and internationally.

Lukwago further stated that there is need to fully fund the Kampala education master plan as a critical intervention which requires Shs 100 billion per year against Shs 48 billion currently being released for the same, most of which is statutory expenditures.

He urged the central government to stop abdicating its duty of providing basic education which is a right, leaving it largely in the hands of the private sector.

“We have kept asking what went wrong,” he queried, adding that a lot of things need to be done to make things right before the situation goes out of hand.

He thanked the teachers in the city public schools for their tireless efforts despite the appalling conditions of work and congratulated some pupils with exceptionally good performance.

The results of the 2022 PLE released on Friday last week indicated that at least 97,000 pupils failed the exams and will have to repeat the class. According to UNEB, of the 832,654 candidates who sat the exams, 97, 109 failed.

This number was higher than the 74,878 who failed PLE exams the previous year in 2021.

The results released also indicated that 714,702 candidates passed the PLE compared to 659,910 the previous year 2021 representing 89.8% of the overall number of candidates who sat for the exams.