More teachers needed to cope with influx of pupils

Uganda’s Universal Primary Education (UPE) programme has increased the numbers of children passing through primary school to such an extent that it risks causing a massive bottleneck in secondary school entrance unless steps are taken to increase capacity, Ugandan ministers have said. “We have some capacity in secondary schools and we are building more, but it is really not enough”, Dorothy Hyuwa, MP and chairwoman of the parliamentary social services committee told IRIN. “We are short of about 7,000 teachers," she said. "We had 61.2bn shillings (US$30m) allocated for secondary but much of it went to improve pay for teachers already in. So we are getting the government to urgently reallocate some 4.6bn (US$2.3m) to recruit more teachers.” The looming bottleneck is a direct consequence of the success of UPE in getting more children into school. When the programme was started in 1997, local districts were overwhelmed by the numbers of children who turned up to receive free education. Many of those beneficiaries from the first year of UPE are now taking their final primary school exams, which means that some 400,000 pupils will be filing out of primary school this September in the hope of progressing to secondary education. “What has been happening is an understandable focus on primary education at the policy level, but we need to be thinking about what happens next,” Hyuwa said. She added that a number of strategies were being implemented to cope with the anticipated influx. “We are working to recruit a further 600 teachers, initially, in the next few weeks. Then we will aim to get more after that. The government is also implementing a programme of building more secondary schools, which is ongoing.” In addition, Hyuwa said, special awards were being given to pupils judged to be bright but lacking the means to pay for their education. Hyuwa said watchdogs were also in place to ensure money allocated for secondary education was not misused.