1 Introduction

Uganda is a landlocked country bordered by Kenya in the East, South Sudan in the North, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in the West, Rwanda in the Southwest and Tanzania in the South. It is comprised of four major ethnic groups (i.e. the Bantu, Hamites, Nilo-Hamites, and the Nilotics), with over 65 dialects. The Bantu-speaking ethnic group (who live in the central, southern and western parts of the country), currently constitutes the majority. The non-Bantu speaking ethnic groups occupy the eastern, northern and north western parts of the country. This ethnic composition plays a major role in shaping Uganda’s national character, political economy and the way of life of the people (UNDP, 2015). Uganda’s population has continued to grow rapidly over time and is one of the world’s fastest growing populations and one of the most youthful with more than half its population—56 percent—under 18. The current population of Uganda according to national household survey data stands at 34.6 million with an annual population growth rate of 3.0 percent recorded between 2002 and 2014 censuses. Of this population, over 80 per cent live in rural areas and directly survive off the environment and natural resource base (UBOS, 2014).

Ethnic conflict and civil war continued into the mid-1980s until President Museveni and the National Resistance Movement (NRM) took power in 1986 after waging a bush war against the Obote regime in the aftermath of the 1980 elections.Footnote 1 The new NRM government promised to build a broad-based movement system built on inclusion and equality. Central to the rapid reforms the NRM introduced in the public sector and the economy was the need to rebuild the education sector to make it more accessible and equitable. As a result, it set up a commission—the Educational Policy Review Commission - to appraise the state of education in Uganda and in 1992, in response to the commission’s recommendations, the government published a white paper on education providing the basis for the introduction of Universal Primary Education (UPE) in 1996 (Government of Uganda, 1992). Significant financial support from donors, including the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), the World Bank, The Netherlands, Irish Aid, and the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) was also provided to the Government of Uganda (GoU) since 1997, creating the financial resources needed to roll out a universal primary education programme (UPE) (Hedger et al., 2010).

By 2015, primary school enrolment was recorded at 8.3 million and the average years of school increased by 2.8 to 7.2 years (UBOS, 2016). This raised the Net Enrolment Rate (NER) at primary level to 96.0% (male 95.6%, female 96.4%) leading to a record 100% achievement of EFA goal by 2015 (UNESCO, 2015). Similarly, Uganda’s literacy rate for the general population significantly improved to 74.6% (male 82.4%, female 66.8%) by 2014 (UBOS, 2016). In 2007, Universal Secondary Education (USE) was also launched providing a greater opportunity for students from poor families to go on to secondary school. It was also helped the government re-elected under a multi-party system in 2006 achieve its commitment to providing a secondary school in every sub-county in Uganda.

In response to the growing concerns about the quality of basic education in Uganda and a decline in government funding in 2002 following the introduction of UPE, two major donor-funded teacher development programmes were implemented: USAID’s Uganda Initiative for Teacher Development Management Systems and the Presidential Initiative on AIDS Strategy Communication to the Youth (UNITY) in 2008 and the UNICEF-supported Quality Improvement in Primary Schools through BRMS Implementation (henceforth QIPS-BRMS) in 2010 funded by The Netherlands, Irish Aid and SIDA. In response to growing public concerns about the quality of UPE following the 2006 general election, the Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) also revised its Basic Requirements and Minimum Standards (BRMS) indicators for education institutions generally referred to as BRMS (Republic of Uganda, 2008).

Following this introduction, the chapter is divided into five sections. Section 1 presents a brief review of the Teacher Development and Management System (TDMS) introduced into Uganda in the late 1990s along with UPE to improve the quality of basic education before going on to discuss the design and implementation of the UNITY and QIPS-BRMS programmes in Sects. 2 and 3. Section 4 discusses the emerging lessons and key priorities for policy makers in Uganda for improving the quality of education as part of the new post-2015 education agenda.

2 Teacher Development and Management System

As discussed in the introduction, Uganda’s education system has undergone significant development since the mid-1990s. In 1998, following the large growth in primary school numbers, the GoU launched the Education Strategic Investment Plan (ESIP). The plan formed part of its sector-wide approach supported by international donor agencies and the Ministry of Education and Sport (MoES, 2000). It was committed to a decentralised approach to education to increase local leadership, capacity and transparency in the distribution of resources, and to achieve greater integration of development partner and government effort to arrive at coherent and comprehensive approach to aid management.

Following on from its commitment to UPE and the abolition of school fees in the mid-1990s, there was a growing recognition by the government of Uganda of the need to increase access, equity and the quality education. With it came the need for a strategy to increase the number of trained teachers and improve the quality of head teacher management skills and the pedagogical skills of teachers for the schools to run efficiently and effectively (Hardman et al., 2011). It was estimated in the ESIP that half of the countries teachers were untrained and that those who had received training were under-trained requiring a teacher education system to be put in place to address this challenge. As a result, the TDMS was devised with a focus on both the teachers in the field and teacher trainees in Primary Teacher Colleges (PTCs). A major part of the strategy was the institutionalisation of a coherent pre-service education and training (PRESET) and in-service education and training (INSET) approach to the primary teacher education system in order to address inherent weaknesses in classroom pedagogy (Penny et al., 2008).

The TDMS was conceived as an integrated delivery system for primary education reform services focusing on improved student learning. (MoES, 2000). The national TDMS network was to operate from the national level of the MoES through its different departments (e.g. Teacher Education Department (TE Dept), National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC) and Educational Standards Agency (ESA)), down to the District Councils (DC) and County Administrative Office (CAO) and PTCs, Coordinating Centres (CC), selected core CC primary schools, managed by the Centre Head Teacher (CHT) and overseen by a Coordinating Centre Tutor (CCT), to reach out to schools clustered around the CC.

The TDMS was made up of 46 PTCs of which 23 were seen as being core to the delivery of school-based INSET. Kyambogo University, acting on behalf of the MOES, was made responsible for all of the PTCs, and relied on 9 co-ordinating-centres to act as a mechanism for the delivery of a mixed-mode education diploma for practising teachers, offering face-to-face contact during the vacations.

A uniform PTC curriculum was also produced by Kyambogo University which consisted of professional studies, mathematics, language, science, social studies and cultural studies. It also organised training for tutors, moderators and monitors of college examinations. Each core PTC had up to 40 INSET teacher educators, called coordinating tutors (CT), attached to the college. They were provided with a motorbike to enable them to do in-school continuing professional development work (CPD) work, which comprised the majority of their time. Each CT was responsible for providing workshops at the CC on Saturdays and during school holidays, and school-based support involving lesson observation and feedback to teachers and head teachers within a reasonable distance of their centre. District Inspectors of Schools (DIS) also provided some support supervision but their role was mainly to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of implementation. During the first four years of the TDMS programme, activities were implemented in six phases, and covered 56 districts of Uganda.

A Core PTC had a number of CCs connected to it. These CCs had a number of outreach schools connected to them and they are also connected to a CPTC. This formed an administrative network through which Core PTCs operated under the TDMS. The school-based cluster model was designed to provide INSET/upgrading training opportunities to under qualified and untrained (licensed) teachers to acquire grade three teachers certificate without leaving their jobs and families for a long time. It was a three-year on-the job training programme. The programme also made use of self-study modules, weekend seminars and short face-to-face residential sessions of 10 days run by CCTs and held at the PTCs during the holidays. During term time, the INSET students continued teaching their classes in their respective schools, thereby applying the knowledge and skills acquired from self-study modules and peer group meetings/week-end seminars.

The CPD provision was designed to support all practising teachers and head teachers through workshops, seminars and short courses that were mainly held at week-ends during term time and over school holidays at CCs and outreach schools. INSET for the CCTs was also conducted during the residential courses. Resource centre at the CC were also set up to provide professional development and support to teachers within the CC catchment area. It was through such courses that new approaches in improving quality of education were introduced to teachers. Topics included multi-grade teaching, equity in the classroom, management of large classrooms and the use of positive reinforcement approaches to student behaviour management.

The TDMS network was implemented through a network of 539 CCs each of which coordinated a cluster of an average number of 25 outreach categories of schools including government of Uganda, community and private schools. One school in each cluster was selected using national criteria to serve as the CC school.

3 UNITY Teacher Development Programme

One of the major donor funded teacher development programmes in Uganda over the past decade has been the UNITY teacher development programme funded by USAID which started in 2006 and ran until 2011. Following an evaluation of the TDMS in 2003 which suggested that the system and the PTCs were inadequately staffed and funded, thereby undermining its overall contribution to improving the quality of education, UNITY’s focus was on quality education through a large teacher education and training component aimed at strengthening the effectiveness of TDMS (USAID, 2008).

Working through the MoES’s decentralised TDMS, UNITY focused on developing the skills of the district level education officers to support schools and clusters and build collaboration with the PTCs. By utilizing the TDMS’s existing structures, UNITY’s aim was to build capacity and strengthen ownership of the system structures at the district level to ensure the longer-term sustainability of the initiative. Among the professional development activities offered by UNITY was the Certificate in Teacher Education Proficiency aimed at the capacity building of teacher educators in modern pedagogy, classroom management, and skills in how to provide peer-to-peer support accredited and institutionalized by Kyambogo University.

In addition to working ‘upstream’ at the national level, UNITY also worked ‘downstream’ at the district, school and community level by employing a range of strategies to improve district monitoring, whole school planning and to motivate parents to become more involved in their children’s education and to hold schools accountable for their provision. To effectively address the challenges of education service delivery under a decentralised policy framework, it was recognised that the districts needed a system of collection, integration, processing, maintenance and dissemination of school performance data. This would support evidence-based decision making, policy-analysis and formulation, planning, monitoring and management at the district and school levels.

Focusing on 22 districts (i.e. 20 per cent of Uganda’s districts), UNITY trained district officers in using the Education Management Information System (EMIS) in evidence-based decision making, policy-analysis and formulation, planning, monitoring and management at the district, sub-county and school levels. In this way it introduced school performance reviews to audit school and district performance against the nationally approved indicators and to share the information with parents and community members. It also helped 2,028 primary schools to set up and train School Management Committees (SMCs) and head teachers in developing and implementing school improvement plans and to mobilise local leaders, civil society, parents and communities to tackle critical issues in education facing the schools (USAID, 2008).

4 Quality Improvement in Primary Schools Through BRMS Implementation

The Quality Improvement in Primary Schools Through BRMS Implementation (QIPS-BRMS programme) built on the MoEST’s review of the Basic Requirements and Minimum Standards (BRMS) indicators for education institutions, generally referred to as BRMS, which was designed to increase child participation and survival rates in primary schools and improve the quality of primary education through innovative projects.

The focus of the QIPS-BRMS programme was to be on four key support systems:

  • District education offices (DEOs) which acted as coordination centres, liaising between education and local government in the district;

  • The 23 PTCs which under the TDMS had outreach capacity provided through the CCTs who were based in the colleges but worked in schools;

  • The national Directorate for Education Standards (DES) which was mandated with inspecting schools and advising on improvements to the quality of the student learning experience;

  • District education authorities who also conducted school inspections at municipal and district level through the DIS and the Municipal Inspectors of Schools (MIS).

It therefore aimed to improve CCT’s engagement with schools to provide professional development and support, enhance teacher performance and community engagement to improve completion rates and learning outcomes, and to improve the coordination of district education partners (i.e. DEO, PTC, DES).

The QIPS-BRMS programme supported a comprehensive long-term coaching and mentoring training programme to develop the capacity of all CC tutors and DIS across 73 districts, covering two-thirds of the country, in Uganda to support primary teachers and head teachers to implement the MoES’s minimum standards. The rationale for adopting a mentoring approach was to address the well documented failures of cascade training workshops to transfer to schools and to improve the practices of participants (Save the Children, 2012). It also built on research suggesting mentoring was highly effective at the school and classroom level in changing pedagogical and leadership practices and was, in the long term, more cost effective (Bean, 2014).

Specifically, the QIPS-BRMS mentoring programme focused on strengthening the TDMS and inspectorate systems by developing the capacity of CC tutors and DIS to successfully support primary teachers and head teacher in implementing the BRMS standards in primary schools together with the new lower school thematic curriculum and revised upper primary curricula. A new, concise 33-page inspection manual focusing on both quality assurance and quality enhancement was also produced along with a self-evaluation guide for schools to be conducted prior to an inspection (MoES, 2012a, 2012b).

In an end of programme review by UNICEF in 2016, it was reported that over the four years of its implementation 2,860 ‘model’ schools and, indirectly, 15,962 schools in 77 districts have benefited from the QIPS-BRMS training. It also included the training of 4,369 SMC members (2,897 male; 1,472 females and the production of a ‘best practices’ booklet for the CCTs and for distribution to schools arising from the mentor training and the provision of instructional materials to the model schools (UNICEF, 2013). The pedagogical practices collected by UNICEF from the mentors reflect the richness of the experience and the ideas that were generated by the international mentors working across the fifteen PTCs with the 313 CCTs.

One hundred and twenty-seven CCTs were also provided with new motorbikes to facilitate their visits to schools and a mobile phone-based system for the collection of baseline and evaluation data in 19 districts and 1600 schools. In terms of QIPS-BRMS’s impact on the quality of education provision, it was reported that completion rates to the end of primary had risen by 2 percent from the 2010 baseline of 50 percent (52% males; 47% females) and the drop-out rate had declined by 3 percent. Primary Leaving Exam (PLE) results had also improved by 3 percent in the 2,860 schools reached by 286 CCTs supported by the 17 mentors compared to a 2010 baseline. A system for reporting violence against children was also found to be effectively functioning in 44 percent of the schools.

5 Conclusions

In the Ugandan context, the TDMS system set up in the late 1990s working through the PTCs with outreach to schools through the CCTs is a key element in sustaining their impact on the education system. However, there is a need for greater political, financial and policy commitment on the part of the GoU and MoES to invest in the future continuation of the school-based cluster system. While the CCTs form a natural link between the schools and the education system and therefore have a key role to play in supporting pedagogical improvements in the schools, most of the present cadre of CCTs are nearing retirement. Both the USAID and UNICEF-supported programmes have shown that a motivated and better trained and resourced cadre of CCTs can make a significant and positive impact on schools. Therefore, adequate funding from the government needs to be secured for both the continuation of the school-based cluster system and the necessary capacity development of the CCTs.

Sustainability also goes beyond financial sustainability as integration of any intervention within the context of the long-term goals for the education system is a major priority. For this there needs to be a good understanding of the political, social, economic and cultural context in which the programme will operate, as ‘best practices’ cannot merely be transferred from one country to another. If programmes like UNITY and BRMS are to be sustained in the education system once donor funding and international support is withdrawn they must also have a systemic impact. This suggests they need to impact on national policy and building capacity and be owned by the state institutions with clear role and responsibilities mapped out. Ownership of the programme needs to involve each level of stakeholder throughout the system, from national through regional down to school level head teachers and including teachers and parents.

There also needs to be transparency throughout the system with feedback mechanisms that can sustain change and bring interventions to scale by, for example, gaining political support, devising incentives and ensuring adequate funding is made available to each level of the system for it to carry out its roles and responsibilities. Such feedback mechanisms to ensure transparency and accountability throughout the system are fundamental to sustainable development, systemic change and continuous improvement, requiring the alignment between institutional leadership and stakeholder ownership. Without such stakeholder involvement and ownership, surviving frequent changes in political leadership will be difficult.

As the education programmes discussed in this chapter suggest, putting in place a systematic monitoring and evaluation system in Uganda with input from stakeholders across all levels of the education system will improve accountability, planning and implementation, and assist in knowledge sharing. As discussed in the UNICEF-supported QIPS-BRMS, the starting point should always be a baseline assessment of existing classrooms practices. A broad situation analysis of all factors affecting education quality and access is also highly desirable, as is an analysis of existing structures, systems and policies and plans. Research suggests, too often new teacher education initiatives start at the micro-level and are very seldom scaled up because they have not addressed systemic issues that need to be identified through feasibility studies, audits and baseline studies to gauge existing capacity and identify developmental inputs (Riddell 2012).

Understanding the political economy of education at the municipal and district level is also necessary if we want to know why education reforms are often not fully implemented or sustained and to understand the political economy factors explaining local-level variance in school performance (Kjær and Nansozi 2016). In supporting decentralisation of the education system down to municipal and district level, it must be recognised that this brings problems in implementing national reforms, including corruption and leakages at various levels of education expenditure (UWEZO, 2012). Given the decline in funds to the education system by the national government to provide for across-the-board improved quality of education since 2002, the variation in performance of schools will also be impacted on by local contextual factors, such as the wealth of the municipal government, and the strength of the local community.

As Kjær and Nansozi (2016) suggest, the extent to which a school’s performance varies within its local community relates very much to the position of the school within local patronage networks, and the relationship of the head teacher, SMC and parents to local elites and politicians. As discussed in the introduction, prior to 1996 and the rebuilding of a national education system in Uganda, throughout the 1970s and 1980s PTAs effectively ran schools, thereby empowering local political elites and vested interests at the municipal and district level. It is also recognised that despite the introduction of UPE, many parents face hidden costs of education and that schools that perform well often rely on the support and input of the parents, as well as their political connections with local council.

As a result of the need for additional educational from parents and weak monitoring and auditing systems, it is estimated that there is considerable leakage of education funding at several levels through, for example, the payment of ‘ghost teachers’ and the misuse of budgets at the district level. Also, local councillors and district officials may use their discretion to, for example, allocate teachers or grant permission to set up private schools. Within schools, leakages also occur due to high rates of absenteeism by students, teachers and head teachers and many parents turn to low-cost private schools to achieve what they see as a better education for their children. Such trends militate against the idea of UPE as being an economic equaliser and social leveller. Corruption with the education system also discourages international donors from supporting the GoU through sector-wide approaches, thereby perpetuating programme/project initiatives rather than systemic reforms funded through government channels (Riddell 2012).

As the government supported by the international donor community continues to expand the system through the introduction of universal secondary education and vocational training programmes, it is clear that a political commitment to educational quality is required by significantly increasing the funding of education along with the national growth in GDP and GNI in Uganda to ensure systemic reforms that will bring about pedagogical solutions. Increased funding is needed to expand the capacity of the school-based cluster system to run an integrated and unified teacher training which combines both pre- and in-service teacher education and training, to rehabilitate all non-core PTCs to the level of the core PTCs and to expand the CCT system to include pre-primary, special educational needs, secondary and technical and vocational education and training.

As the review of the education programmes discussed in this chapter suggests, the sustainability of the school-based cluster system set up under the TDMS in Uganda to bring about pedagogical solutions will largely depend on the motivation of personnel in the PTCs and outreach faculties who continue to offer professional mentoring, support supervision and training to teachers and head teachers (Lyseight-jones, P.E. 2016). Providing professional development opportunities for PRESET and outreach teacher educators will be central to their capacity building and effectiveness when working with schools and teachers. The creation of district head teacher leadership and peer mentoring will also go a long way to augment and complement the efforts of CCTs in providing the necessary synergies in improving teaching and learning, as well as management and governance. Securing the future of the CCT’s role in supporting education development in all sectors at the district and school level will play a key role in improving the quality educational outcomes in Uganda.