A month after the full resumption of physical studies in Uganda, the Education and Sports Ministry is yet to distribute the abridged curriculum that is expected to guide learning in primary and secondary schools for the next three years.
When schools reopened on January 10, 2022, the ministry directed the automatic promotion of learners and developed an abridged curriculum to allow the learners to catch up and transition back into the learning process.
Some topics were scrapped, others merged with teachers required to focus on selected competencies under the abridged curriculum. Although the National Curriculum Development Centre-NCDC produced the curriculum in question, the Ministry is yet to avail the printed version.
Ketty Lamaro, the Permanent Secretary in the Education Ministry, says that they have started the procurement process to secure a contractor to print and distribute the abridged curriculum to over 30,519 schools across the country.
She revealed this on Tuesday afternoon during a media briefing that was promptly called to “popularize and clarify” what the abridged curriculum is all about. Prior to school reopening, educationists and teachers asked the Ministry to avail them with the condensed curriculum in time to enable teachers to prepare their schemes of work and lesson plan but the ministry remained silent on the issue.
At one time, the Education Minister, Janet Museveni informed headteachers that the abridged wouldn’t be used and advised schools to develop their own catch-up plan. However, the Ministry rescinded the decision a few days before physical learning resumed on January 10, 2022. Without the curriculum in question, many teachers across the country are still guessing on, which content to teach.
Dr Grace Baguma, the Director of NCDC, says that as schools wait for the printed version of the curriculum, they should make use of the soft copies, which they can access from the website of the ministry of education and other platforms.
“The curriculum is aimed at recovery of lost time and enabling all learners to be brought on board as schools open. It was also meant to enable the learner to cope with the demands and learning rigour of the next level following the automatic promotion. We have already produced these items. they are on our websites; we have been sharing them on different social media forums. teachers should be able to access them. But, they should know that this is not a strange thing,” says Baguma.
Dr Baguma’s comment is made on assumption that all teachers have access to the said websites, which might not be true. Teachers have in the recent past struggled to access digital devices and platforms. In 2019, many teachers failed to upload their academic papers on the teacher management system with many spending hundreds of thousands of their hard-earned money to pay tech-savvy people to help them create email accounts.
Nonetheless several schools, more so those urban areas, have already accessed and started using the abridged curriculum. Lamaro also insisted that teachers in all areas of the country should look for means of accessing the curriculum as the government finalises the process of giving them hard copies given the fact that assessments and national examinations by the UNEB will be informed by the same.
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