In Summary: Kings Kids Nursery and Primary School Director Immaculate Oriide has attributed the school’s sustained academic performance to committed teachers, close monitoring of learners, parental involvement and regular assessment. The school, which reportedly produced 31 Division One candidates out of 45 in the 2025 Primary Leaving Examinations, this year deployed 12 teachers to prepare its 40 candidates for the 2026 examinations.
Pallisa, Uganda — A widening gap in learning conditions between private and government-aided schools in Pallisa District has brought renewed attention to the role of teacher commitment, parental involvement, school management and access to basic learning materials in determining academic performance.
At the centre of the debate is Kings Kids Nursery and Primary School, which its director, Immaculate Oriide, says has maintained the district’s top academic position for eight consecutive years through deliberate investment in teachers, individual learner support and close collaboration with parents.
What began as a small Sunday school under a tree behind AGAPE International Ministries has grown into what the school describes as one of Pallisa’s leading academic institutions.
About 15 years ago, according to the account shared by the school, Bishop Joshua Oriide, founder of AGAPE Ministries International, decided to organise children who regularly disrupted church prayers by gathering them under a tree for Sunday school lessons.
His wife, Immaculate Oriide, took responsibility for teaching the children. The small initiative gradually developed into a kindergarten before expanding into Kings Kids Nursery and Primary School.
Today, the institution is positioning itself as a model of how consistent school management, teacher commitment and parental participation can contribute to improved learning outcomes.
In the 2025 Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE), Kings Kids presented 45 candidates, of whom 31 obtained Division One.
The school says this represented approximately one-third of the 98 Division One candidates recorded across Pallisa District that year.
For the 2026 examinations, the school presented 40 candidates, with Oriide deploying 12 teachers to support their preparation, three teachers per subject, as the institution targets a 100 per cent pass rate when results are released in early 2027.
In an exclusive interview with DailyExpress following the conclusion of the PLE examinations, Oriide attributed the school’s performance to teachers who approach their work as a professional responsibility and a calling.
She began by acknowledging God for what she described as the transformation of her family’s vision into a service to the community through formal education and skills development programmes. “Being in the top and maintaining of the district in performance is very challenging and calls for innovations that keep rebranding your product,” she said.
She explained that one of the school’s strategies has been reducing the teacher-to-pupil ratio to enable closer attention to individual learners. “As Kings Kids, we kept on narrowing the gap between teacher to pupils ratio in order to have every pupil fully helped basing on his or her pace of grasping concepts and this makes a learner fully recognized,” Oriide said.
The director said the school also places considerable emphasis on parental responsibility, arguing that academic performance cannot be left to teachers and school administrators alone.
Under its admission and learning arrangements, parents are required to provide scholastic materials, including 24-counter exercise books, a dozen A4 exercise books, an atlas and a mathematical set, while also committing to meet the school’s feeding and remedial lesson requirements.
“The parent owns the school, the director only steers, teachers do their part and children are modelled to get knowledge and given enough to practice in form of 30 assessment test drawn from other districts and renowned established schools,” she said.
Oriide said the assessments expose learners to different examination styles and help teachers identify areas requiring additional attention. She challenged fellow school directors and headteachers to strengthen relationships with parents and involve them in school management and learner development.
She also expressed a desire to see Pallisa produce more than 1,000 Division One candidates in future examinations, arguing that collective commitment from schools and families would be necessary to achieve that ambition.
Overcrowded classrooms, limited learning materials
While Kings Kids presents a model built around smaller learning groups and close parental involvement, the experience at some government-aided schools in Pallisa reveals the difficulties facing institutions operating with limited resources.
At Ajepet Primary School in Gogonyo Sub-county, Headteacher Charles Richard Oduch says overcrowded classrooms and inadequate scholastic materials are undermining the learning process. He estimates that some teachers handle between 90 and 120 pupils in a single classroom, making it difficult to provide individual attention and monitor learners’ progress effectively.
Oduch also expressed concern that some parents have misunderstood the government’s free education policy, assuming that they are no longer required to provide basic learning materials for their children.
“Parents have taken shelter of irresponsibility and have mistaken the government policy of no school fees payment to mean sending children to school without even a 32-paged exercise book, no uniform, nothing at all, yet those are the items they are supposed to provide,” he said.
He said the consequences are particularly severe among pupils in lower classes, where shortages of exercise books sometimes interrupt learning. “A pupil can come to school without a book and when asked narrates how it was withdrawn and taken to the health centre to be used as a medical book. So learning stops, not because the child refused, but because the book has become a hospital card,” Oduch said.
The headteacher’s account illustrates how household poverty and competing family needs can affect children’s ability to participate consistently in classroom activities. For some families, basic scholastic materials may compete with other essential household expenses, leaving pupils without the tools required to complete assignments and follow lessons.
Headteacher calls for benchmarking
At Omuroka Primary School in Kameke Sub-county, Headteacher Orukan Isa believes that public and private schools can learn from one another through professional collaboration and benchmarking.
He argued that the differences in school performance should encourage managers to examine teaching methods, school administration and parental engagement rather than dismissing the achievements of private institutions. “There is need for school managers to go for benchmarking in schools such as Kings Kids so that the mindset gets refreshed to do what they are supposed to undertake,” he said.
Benchmarking, he suggested, could help headteachers identify practical approaches that can be adapted to improve teaching, learner supervision and school management within their own institutions.
Concerns over school feeding
At the district headquarters, Senior Education Officer Stephen Opela said schools should serve as centres of positive change, transforming learners into responsible citizens and agents of socio-economic development. However, he identified inadequate school feeding as one of the challenges affecting learning outcomes.
Opela said hungry learners struggle to concentrate and compete academically, regardless of the quality of teaching they receive. He commended headteachers who had successfully engaged parents to provide lunch and essential scholastic materials, saying family participation remains important in supporting children’s education.
As thousands of PLE candidates return to their communities after completing their examinations, Opela also urged parents and guardians to provide guidance and protect the children from activities that could expose them to danger. “I don’t want to hear of any bad thing happening to these candidates because they go out gatecrashing in functions, getting unwanted pregnancies,” he said.
His warning highlights the need for continued parental supervision and community support during the period between the completion of primary examinations and the transition to secondary education.
The contrasting experiences of schools in Pallisa point to a broader challenge in education: academic performance depends not only on teachers and school leadership, but also on the learning environment, availability of basic materials, nutrition and the level of support children receive from their families.
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