By Ocama Moses
The Ministry of Education and Sports took the much-awaited education reform by replacing the old subject-based curriculum with a new thematic or competency-based curriculum for lower secondary in 2020. Many academic contents under the new reform, considered obsolete and redundant, were cut, and similar relevant content was merged to create more space for developing critical thinking and problem-solving skills in what is known as the Competency-Based Curriculum.
“The Ministry of Education, in conjunction with the National Curriculum Development Center (NCDC), made the major shift from the conventional subject-based curriculum to the thematic curriculum with a deep belief that such an education entails more on a broader and inclusive curriculum that can satisfy the needs of different abilities.”
Unfortunately, just like most government programs, its implementation became riddled with great challenges for upcountry schools and became the most unprepared curriculum implementation. It became a case of a very good curriculum abused by strategic deadlocks in the implementation.
My insider observations across West Nile secondary schools: In Term One 2020, without training and textbooks, teachers were left stranded on what to do with the reported Senior One learners. After a month of this confused opening, due to a lack of clarity on what to teach and how to teach the Senior One students (who are now the outgoing Senior Four candidates in 2024), NCDC started calling teachers for the long-overdue retooling.
We could see open confusion and contradiction among master trainers, teachers, and developers during the retooling exercise, which I attended in Mvara Secondary School, Arua, under the West Nile Region. This means teachers were never part of the curriculum development process or weren’t adequately consulted during the process. The majority of teachers welcomed the changes grudgingly, though the implementers were determined to push through with implementation.
When teachers returned from the first training sessions, equipped to start the curriculum implementation, the National Curriculum Development Center (NCDC) and the Ministry had not distributed textbooks and teachers’ guides to schools throughout the country. Later, prototype books were brought for use. Senior Ones ended Term One with prototype books, which they continued using up to the second term of Senior Two. NCDC eventually brought published versions of the New Lower Secondary School Curriculum textbooks for Senior Two and, later, for Senior Three and Senior Four.
The manner of distribution also left many questions. Some schools received 10 teachers’ copies and one or two students’ copies for a subject. In some instances, there were four students’ copies without a teacher’s guide. Many subjects were missing copies, and very many private schools never got the first supplies. Rich private schools and government-supported schools deployed their financial resources to buy textbooks or photocopy them, while poor schools had to wait patiently.
This confusion in supplies never accounted for the time wasted in teaching and learning and never considered the population of students in schools when distributing books. This means the books supplied were inadequate compared to most schools’ populations.
Then came competition between NCDC and Uganda National Examination Board (UNEB) over assessment. Who has the sole authority over assessment? The NCDC-taught assessment criteria were dropped by UNEB, yet teachers had received textbooks detailing criteria for assessments in all subjects.
It took UNEB three and a half years to retool teachers on their assessment methods in 2023/2024. This means assessment training was done in some regions just a few months before the UNEB examinations in 2024, highlighting a lack of collaboration between NCDC and UNEB.
The integration of ICT in all subjects and making ICT compulsory in Senior One and Two created a high demand for computers, tablets, smartphones, projectors, flip charts, and digital education aids, which became integral parts of the curriculum. Many upcountry schools that had never owned computers had to embrace the ICT subject, which had become compulsory. The reforms did not address the internet connectivity challenges in rural schools or the lack of computer laboratories for enhancing ICT. Before making ICT compulsory, one would have expected basic ICT infrastructure to be put in place in all learning institutions.
The Lower Secondary Curriculum initially proposed that the Directorate of Industrial Training (DIT) examine practical learners’ project work by Senior Three, which would have given students certificates usable for job placements after school. However, the government canceled this program. The justification for this cancellation was the lack of materials for industrial training, which were not supplied to schools. Most schools couldn’t afford the demands of industrial training, including fees levies, without government support.
The new curriculum for lower secondary schools, though heavily demanding on both learners and teachers in humanities and sciences, was benchmarked against countries where no “salary apartheid” was practiced. In Uganda, however, uniform best practices were discarded in favor of salary disparities, which have further damaged the goodwill to implement the curriculum, particularly among arts and humanities teachers.
The writer is a coordinator for Uganda Professional Humanity Teachers’ Union,
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