The Kampala City Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago has attributed the decline in performance of the just recently released PLE results to the Universal Primary Education (UPE) program.
While presenting the performance of KCCA public schools in Kampala yesterday, he revealed that out of the 38,105 pupils who sat for their PLE from the 79 KCCA schools 1,930 candidates failed. This is in comparison to 1,266 in 2020.
Lukwago says that this poor performance is mainly due to Covid-19 and underfunding by the government to the UPE program. The Lord Mayor further blamed the UPE program for the collapse of quality education in various schools in Kampala such as Kitante Primary school, Bat Valley Primary School, Nakasero Primary School among others that were known for excellent performance.
“In all our UPE schools, each child is allocated a paltry sum of 9,300 shillings (USD 2.5) per year, which translates to 1,033 shillings per month per child. Considering the very high cost of living and inflation, we find this very illogical and next to impossible for these schools to perform as expected, and thus condemning the unfortunate learners as failures at a tender age on account of ineptitude,” he said.
Statistics, show that though the number of the candidates who passed with first division in 2022, increased from 26.3 percent in 2022 to 34.4 percent, the overall passing dropped from 96.2 percent to 95 percent in the same period.
The Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) has appealed to the Government to increase the education sector budget to at least sh100b per year to help in the implementation of a five-year master plan which has been lying on the shelf. Kampala district has 79 public schools.
