5.2 Government responsibilities under the Education Act

TABLE 5.2 Government responsibilities under the Education Act

FUNCTION CENTRAL GOVERNMENT

Policy • Setting policy on all matters concerning education and training • Setting and maintaining the national goals and broad aims of education • Encouraging the development of a national language Teachers • Registering and licensing of teachers (primary, secondary, postprimary) • Recruiting, deployment, and promotion of teaching and nonteaching staff (postprimary)

Curriculum and instruction • Providing learning and instructional materials • Developing and controlling the national curriculum • Determining the language of instruction n.a.

Evaluation and supervision

• Evaluating academic standards through continuous assessment and national examinations • Developing management policies for all government and government-aided schools and private schools Institutions • Ensuring the equitable geographic distribution of education institutions • Regulating, establishing, and registering educational institutions • Providing buildings (de facto) Financing • Restricting collection of fees by government schools and government-aided schools

Source: World Bank based on the Education Act, 2008. Note: n.a. = not applicable. LOCAL GOVERNMENT

n.a.

• Recruiting, deployment, and promotion of teaching and nonteaching staff (primary) • Management, monitoring, supervising, and disciplining of staff and students (primary) • Ensuring teachers’ welfare

• Ensuring the supervision of student performance in both public and private schools

• Ensuring the equitable geographic distribution of education institutions • Providing and maintaining buildings (de jure and de facto)

• Passing on capitation grants to schools

primary teachers and primary school inspectors within approved personnel budget limits, with the input of the District Education Officer (DEO).24 Two recent surveys have found serious shortcomings in some districts with teacher job vacancies and redeployment, noting that key stakeholders such as headmasters and DEOs are not fully involved in the process (Ernst & Young 2019; Lwanga, munyambonera, and Guloba 2018). In addition, LGs are authorized to procure and supervise improvements in school infrastructure and to procure and supervise the construction of new schools.

Schools themselves have only limited responsibilities, which include hiring contract teachers and nonteaching school staff, procuring instructional materials in addition to those provided by moES (typically, the textbook budget is minimal and donor-dependent), and procuring small school improvements and administrative necessities (Najjumba, Habyarimana, and Bunjo 2013). Head teachers and school management committees (SmCs), which usually meet only once or twice a year, appear to have, relative to many countries, few mandated responsibilities with respect to teachers, curriculum, or finance (Najjumba, Habyarimana, and Bunjo 2013; Twaweza 2018a, 2018b). Headmasters perceive the DEO as the major decision-maker for teacher transfers or suspensions, as well as the person to whom they submit requests related to school improvements. Teachers are often paid allowances from the capitation grant resources, although this is officially discouraged (National Planning Authority 2018c).

Alignment of funding with responsibilities

virtually all funding for education originates from the central government. Local governments’ own revenues for supporting education are minimal,25 and LGs

have only limited discretion over the funds they receive from the central government because these resources are largely in the form of sector-specific wage and nonwage conditional grants. (See discussion in section titled The IGFT in education.)

Central government budgetary support for education, which totaled US$915 million in 2019–20, has declined by 50 percent as a share of GDP since 1997–98. Despite large increases in the school-age population and notwithstanding recent increases particularly in secondary and higher education financing, the government shifted its emphasis to other sectors, and budget support to education was reduced following the end of a large primary school and classroom building program in 2007–08.

Approximately half of the national budget for education is retained at the central level to support the central government’s education responsibilities, including the operating costs of the moES, selected TvET institutions, higher education, examinations and curriculum design, and a small budget line for textbooks for primary and secondary education. Some donor projects are also budgeted as part of the central ministry. During the 2010s, the central government budget for its central responsibilities increased, particularly for higher education (see figure 5.3).

The remaining half of the national budget for education is transferred every year to LGs and schools to fund their delivery of education services.26 These transfers from the central government constitute over 98 percent of the LGs’ budgeted education expenditures for primary and secondary education, primary teaching colleges, and other postsecondary technical and vocational colleges.

The central government has paid capitation grants to schools since 1997 to enable them to carry out their teaching and learning responsibilities. However, these grants are small (for example, only US$3.86 per primary student in 2019–20) and are not adequate to enable schools to procure textbooks and other instructional materials for all their students. School headmasters and SmCs have few other official resources to draw from to carry out their responsibilities. Other resources at the school level can sometimes include unofficial fees in the form of voluntary contributions from parents,27 which one study found

FIGURE 5.3

Centrally funded education expenditures per capita, 1997/98–2019/20

25

Real 2019–20 US$ 20

15

10

5

0 1997/981998/991999/002000/012001/022002/032003/042004/052005/062006/072007/08 2009/102010/112011/122012/132013/142014/152015/162016/172017/182018/192019/202008/09

Central (MoES, KCCA, and agencies) LG (postsecondary) Central (tertiary) LG (primary) LG (secondary)

Source: Hedger et al. 2010; World Bank calculations using data from MoFPED Budget Books. Note: KCCA = Kampala City Council Authority; LG = local government; MoES = Ministry of Education and Sports; MoFPED = Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development; US$ = US dollar.

outstripped the amount of the capitation grant per school by a factor of more than five in 2015 and provided a median US$11.50 per student per year to government primary schools (Uganda Bureau of Statistics 2016b).28 Teachers’ salaries are paid directly by the moFPED, based on payrolls prepared by LGs.

Current education challenges

Access Ensuring access to schooling involves not only providing an adequate number of schools but also an adequate amount of actual instruction. In most districts in Uganda, there is widespread access to government primary schools, and these schools provide primary education to most school-age children. Recent surveys have shown that only 10 to 15 percent of children between ages 6 and 14 were out of school, although a high share were repeating a grade and some were attending nongovernment schools (Twaweza 2019a).29 Actual instruction is compromised by the limited availability of instructional materials, teacher absenteeism, and insufficient infrastructure. For example, recent visits by researchers from Twaweza to a random sample of P2 classrooms in over 900 schools showed that only 37.5 percent of the classes had textbooks for at least half of the students, and teachers were absent from a fifth of the classrooms visited, while other in-school distractions accounted for another fifth of teachers’ time, reducing actual instructional presence by over 40 percent (Twaweza 2019a). In addition, these classroom visits recorded severe infrastructure shortcomings.

Access to preschool and secondary education is limited. Government support does not cover preprimary classes, and as of 2019, three-quarters of preschool-age children (ages 4 and 5) remained out of school. Fewer than 35 percent of 3- to 5-year-olds had experienced any type of preschool.30

Access to secondary education is constrained by a lack of schools at that level, despite the government’s announced commitment to achieving USE. As of 2016–17, only 56 percent of primary school graduates had continued to lower secondary school (moES 2019a; Uganda Bureau of Statistics 2017). Examinations restrict access to both lower secondary and upper secondary schooling, while informal fees and strategic exclusion of weaker students from examinations are likely to be additional barriers.31

Equity Significant differences in access to primary schooling remain, with lower enrollment rates in poorer rural areas than in more affluent urban areas. Well over half of all children between ages 6 and 14 in Karamoja subregion were out of school in 2015 (Twaweza 2016a). The private sector share of primary enrollment is highest in the most affluent subregions. However, private schools are also relied on in poorer regions with few government schools (see figure 5.4). Financing to cover teachers’ wages is not distributed according to need, and there are large disparities among districts as will be discussed in the section titled Decentralization and equity.

Gender parity in access has been achieved in primary education but not in secondary education, and more girls than boys passed the Primary Leaving Examination (PLE) in 2019.32 At the secondary level, gender differences in access remain pronounced, with transition rates from primary to lower secondary and from lower secondary to upper secondary favoring males (see figure 5.5). In 2014,

FIGURE 5.4

Children aged 6 to 14, by education type and subregion, 2015

Children aged 6–14 (%) 100

80

60

40

20

0 AnkoleRwenzori ToroKigeziBugandaLangoBunyoro TesoAcholiBugisuSebeiWest NileBusogaBukediKaramoja Subregion Government Private Community No school

Source: Twaweza 2015. Note: Subregions are sorted left to right from richest to poorest by 2015–16 poverty headcount in Uganda Bureau of Statistics 2016a.

FIGURE 5.5

Secondary school enrollment, by grade and gender, 2016/17

200

Students (thousands) 150

100

50 177 171 163 156 156 147 139 127

40

28 41

27

0

S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6

Grade

Male Female

Source: Uganda Bureau of Statistics 2017. Note: S = secondary school.

the net secondary enrollment rate for males (42.8 percent) was higher than that for females (38.7 percent), and the gender parity index was 0.89. The GER for the first year of lower secondary (S1)33 was 63.3 percent for males and 58.9 percent for females (Uganda Bureau of Statistics 2017). In 2017, fewer girls than boys enrolled in lower secondary (S1 to S4), and a significantly lower share of girls enrolled in upper secondary (S5 to S6): 34 percent of boys and 24 percent of girls. Repetition rates are similar for both genders.

With respect to learning outcomes, girls outperform boys in early grade assessments, but fall behind in the upper primary and secondary grades. Girls outperformed boys on National Assessment of Progress in Education (NAPE) tests of P3 numeracy and English literacy but underperformed relative to boys on P6 numeracy (UNEB 2014a). Boys outperformed girls on the P6 Southern Africa Consortium for monitoring Educational Quality (SACmEQ) Iv test in both reading and mathematics (moES 2013). At the lower secondary level, girls

and boys performed comparably on NAPE tests of English literacy, but S2 girls fell behind S2 boys in both mathematics and biology (UNEB 2014b).34

Efficiency The education system is inefficient in three main respects: (1) high early grade repetition rates; (2) low primary completion rates; and (3) inequitable teacher distribution. Exceptionally high enrollments in P1 and high primary GERs overall are partly accounted for by very high repetition rates (estimated at 21 percent in the primary system and up to 41 percent in P1) and disguised early childhood enrollment in P1 (Brunette et al. 2017). In 2017, enrollments in P1 were almost 40 percent higher than those in P2 and close to three times as high as those in P7 (see figure 5.6).35 Uganda’s rate of early grade progression is the third lowest among 103 low- and middle-income countries for which data are available (Bashir et al. 2018). The primary completion rate in Uganda has been estimated at 53 percent.

Teacher distribution is highly inefficient, with only a weak relationship between the number of students and teachers in a school. Disparities between schools with the same number of students are large, with schools enrolling 1,000 students having anywhere from no government teachers to more than 30 government teachers (see figure 5.7).

Quality There are serious shortcomings in the quality of education provided to most students in Uganda, both in learning outcomes and in the conditions for learning. Recently, three large-scale learning assessments—the long-running NAPE, Uwezo, and SACmEQ—all pointed to persistent low levels of learning by primary and lower secondary students. Several Early Grade Reading Assessments (EGRAs)36 as well as a refugee-focused Uwezo survey in 2019 (Twaweza 2019) have also found poor learning levels in early grades, although some donorfinanced programs produced some significant learning gains when they were implemented (Brunette et al. 2019).

FIGURE 5.6

Enrollment, by grade and PLE candidates and PLE passed, 2017

Students (thousands) 2,000 1,800 1,600 1,400 1,200 1,000 800 600 400 200 0

P1 P2 P3 P4 P5 P6 P7 PLE candidates PLE passed S1 S2 S3 S4

Source: Uganda Bureau of Statistics 2017. Note: Includes public and private schools. P = primary school; PLE = Primary Leaving Examination; S = secondary school.

FIGURE 5.7

Enrolled students and government teachers per primary school, 2015

3,000

Students 2,000

1,000

0

0 20 40

Government teachers

STR of 53 (current government of Uganda target) Schools 60

Source: Twaweza 2015. Note: Dark blue line = student-teacher ratio (STR) of 53 (Uganda target). Data points represent 3,347 schools in 112 districts. Schools with no government teachers are not shown.

UNEB administers NAPE, which is a sample-based large-scale assessment of student performance in primary and lower secondary school. NAPE has assessed literacy and numeracy in P3 and P6 since 1996, and both subjects plus biology in S2 since 2008 (Kanjee and Acana 2013). On the most recent primary-level NAPE, in 2018, which tested 62,319 students in 1,558 schools across 122 LGs, only about half the students at either P3 or P6 could be considered “proficient” in either reading English or numeracy. On the lower secondary level NAPE, in 2014,37 the percentage of students performing “adequately or better” was 49 percent for English, 41 percent for mathematics, and 20 percent for biology (UNEB 2014b).

Uwezo, a citizen-led household and school survey, includes a learning assessment of fundamental literacy and numeracy skills that is pegged to what would be expected of children in P2. The most recent assessment, in 2018, surveyed 45,670 children in 954 schools in 32 districts and characterized a very small share of children in P3 as having “full competence” at either reading or numeracy, while the results for students in P6 were broadly similar to those on the 2018 NAPE (see figure 5.8). Several recent donor-supported projects are funding education quality improvements. Their outcomes may have come too late to be reflected in the Uwezo and NAPE findings;38 their short-term effects have been large and significant in most cases, but with variations in early learning outcomes for different regional languages (Brunette et al. 2019).

Since 2000, Uganda has also participated in SACmEQ, an assessment of reading and mathematics for P6 students across Southern and Eastern Africa. The most recent SACmEQ assessment, in 2014, tested 6,125 students in 245 schools sampled from 13 of the 15 regions and found that Uganda’s students performed close to the average of the 14 countries that participated in both mathematics and reading, and that more than two-thirds of the country’s P6 students read at an “acceptable” level.39