Out of the 10 districts with the highest failure rate in last year’s PLE, 8 are located in Eastern Uganda with Kamuli district among them. Official results released by UNEB last week indicated that out of 10,076 candidates who sat for PLE in Kamuli district, only 279 passed in division one and 1,699 pupils failed totally. To the district officials, such disturbing results are caused by the government’s policy of automatic promotion and the incompetent teachers. “There is automatic promotion, we have registered all for one to say, those districts which have improved; they denied a chance to other candidates to sit for these exams.” “The government policy is that we should not deny anyone opportunity so we said its fine, let all of them come on board. After all government policy is automatic promotion and they were there in P.7. So let them all be registered and let them all sit.” Said, Charles Akoyo – District Education Officer – Kamuli.

The District Education Officer Charles Akoyo said as a mitigation measure, all teachers in the district needed to be evaluated and validated. “We sat down and said to cut down on the numbers, let us do some simple amplitude. So we gave them some very simple examination and we put the pass mark at 50%. Out of 400 teachers, only 2 could get over 50%.” But the District Inspector of Schools Ibrahim Kanakulya had a different view positioning the blame on the parents saying parents left their children to go for sugarcane cutting and also act as scarecrows in rice gardens. “So children are on the farms, they are scarecrows.” Said the Inspector of Schools, Kamuli.

The Principal Education Officer Kamuli Municipality Joseph Musoke said the poor performance among the Eastern districts might have a collaboration with the report that was released indicating that there was a high level stunted growth among children in the Eastern part of the country. “Eastern region has been named as one of the poor performing areas and I also want to note that when you talk about the stunted growth amongst the children, the percentage is significant within Busoga Sub-region. And that alone is an indicator that there are quite a number of things going wrong.” Said the Principal Education Officer, Kamuli Municipality. Our efforts to talk to the teachers were fruitless as most of them turned down our interview.