analysis
By Judith Nakayiza, Makerere University and Medadi Ssentanda
Private schools are becoming ubiquitous across Africa. Research has shown that their growth, although it has positive effects, is also problematic because many private schools are being set up without proper policy guidelines.
In Uganda, this absence of policy guidelines manifests in private schools’ attitude to the government’s language-in-education policy. Many are simply snubbing the policy – and they are getting away with it.
A policy for literacy
In 2002, Uganda’s literacy rate was 76.2% of people aged between 15 and 24. The Ministry of Education was dissatisfied with this, and in 2004 commissioned an educational review which found that the existing curriculum was poorly structured. It also revealed that English was the language of learning and teaching across all primary school years.
The review’s authors suggested that this was actually crippling learning in the early years, because children were coming from homes where they spoke another language and were expected to become immediately fluent in English.
So in 2007, Uganda’s Ministry of Education introduced a policy that championed mother-………….