Kagadi teachers struggle with new Curriculum Implementation

School heads and teachers in Kagadi district are calling on the government to provide comprehensive training for all educators on the new lower secondary curriculum. They argue that the training they received prior to implementation was inadequate, hindering effective implementation.

Despite commencement of implementation of the lower secondary school revised curriculum, school heads and teachers in Kagadi say they need a refresher training to address challenges they are facing in educating learners under the new arrangement.

For instance, Resty Namubiru a teacher at Kagadi secondary school says, she received training for only one and half days but little did she understand how to implement the curriculum urging government to consider retraining teachers.

"Imagine personally I was trained for just one and half days, and then I have to add on that knowledge to students, practically that is not possible, besides that, the curriculum requires assessing students per head, my class of senior three has 135 students how do I do that surely, forming clusters in class and looking out for each students is very hard" Namubiru said

The educators also highlight a shortage of essential resources, including classrooms, computers, and internet access, which further hampers their ability to teach the new curriculum. Ramadhan Nyondo Barongo school head at Kagadi secondary school says With increasing student enrollment, he also highlighted the critical need for additional staff to take care of the increasing student enrolment especially in government schools.

"Now our call to government is to add us more classes, our current population is 3,319 students but look at the structures, maybe we can be considered for staff quarters so that our teachers keep near and able to teach as early as possible, but as it stands we are very challenged" Nyondo said

Ibrahim Kajubi, a teacher at Naigana secondary school says, the revised curriculum requires use of skills, hands on but the requirements are not available, he says the school lacks tailoring machines, computers among others.

"From the look of things, the curriculum has still remained more of theory even when they are saying it's skill based, we have the books but no equipments to support the hands on training, government need to come in handy on this" He said

Dr. Kedrice Turyagyenda, the team lead of the education policy review commission, currently in Bunyoro to gather feedback for the new education policy, has acknowledged the concerns raised by teachers.

"We have noticed these challenges that curriculum was passed but people were not trained, no Internet in most areas but also computers are not sufficient to facilitate the implementation, these are issues we will Forward to the policy makers for consideration" Dr Turyagyenda said

Additionally, the teachers advocate for the reinstatement of the directorate of industrial training exams at the lower secondary level to promote hands-on skills which was scrapped off by Government saying many schools are finding hardships encouraging students to study vocational lessons that they know will not be examined yet very essential.