Educational stakeholders want the National Curriculum Development Centre and Uganda National Examinations Board to forge a defined strategy that will help secondary students who may fail or wish to re-sit UNEB exams in 2024 or those who will miss the final exams of 2023.
This comes as questions arise on where the likelihood of failures or those that missed exams will go as students sit for final exams of the old curriculum while 2024 will entail the new curriculum exams.
In this, educational experts want UNEB and NCDC to define a strategy that will help such cases.
“Because we all know that not all of them will get certificates at the end of the course so how will those ones be handled? Will they go back to S.1 or? I think the government needs to be clear on this?” questioned the former Kawempe North legislator and school proprietor, Latiif Ssebagala
According to Ssebagala, there is a crisis so eminent in the deferring curriculum between the new and the old one as exhibited by most schools and teachers especially how the new curriculum is being implemented.
“And those who attended the workshops, some did not master the new curriculum well enough to disseminate information to those who didn’t participate. And that’s why you find in some schools, the teachers are doing a dual curriculum; they are teaching the new one but using the approaches of the old one,” added Ssebagala.
As the Ministry of Education prepares the ground for the pioneers of the new curriculum in 2024, who are currently completing S.3, the most practical and skill-oriented department of secondary, the science fraternity at Uganda Professional Science Teachers’ Union (UPSTU) asserts that they have seen some exhibitions of skills from especially the students from urban schools.
“The level of implementation, the results that are obtained in the urban schools like those in Kampala metropolitan may not be the same results that may be obtained from the natural schools,” argued Aron Mugaiga, the General Secretary, Uganda Professional Science Teachers’ Union (UPSTU)
Furthermore, Mugaiga tasks the government to forge ways on how schools countrywide can be balanced in terms of capacity.
“So what the government should do, is to find a way of balancing. If the schools in Kampala are able to take care of teachers by adding what the government will pay like PTA allowance, food ratios and even child allowance, the government can find a way of motivating teachers in rural schools. In that case, there will be a balance and teachers will implement the curriculum satisfactorily amidst motivation,” Mugaiga added.
The implementation of the new curriculum kicked off with widespread outcry about the challenges like insufficient trained teachers, and lack of relevant pedagogical tools and now the nation waits to see the products that will come out in 2024.