MPS WANT HON. JANET MUSEVENI REFERRED TO DISCIPLINARY COMMITTEE FOR CONTEMPT OF PARLIAMENT
Members of Parliament are pushing to have the Education Minister, Hon. Janet Museveni referred to Disciplinary Committee for contempt of Parliament.
On Thursday, the Speaker of Parliament Right Hon. Rebecca Kadaga directed the Minister of Education to appear before Parliament and explain steps taken on the MPs resolution to halt the implementation of the new revised lower secondary curriculum.
Kadaga made the directive amid calls from a section of Members of Parliament to send the Minister to the disciplinary committee of parliament for refusing to implement a resolution of parliament halting the curriculum.
Last week parliament halted the implementation of the revised lower secondary curriculum, which among others scraps termly examinations.
Primary Curriculum
Pre-Primary and Primary department is responsible for development of curriculum and curricular materials for Pre -Primary and Primary cycles. The department has two sections; the Pre-Primary Section and the Primary section.
Secondary Curriculum
The Secondary Education in Uganda is a six year cycle from Senior one to Senior six having learners with average age between 14 years and 19 years. It is one of the options for forward progression under Uganda’s education system.
BTVET Curriculum
The Business, Technical and Vocational Education and Training (BTVET) department of NCDC, develops competence-based curricula in line with the BTVET Act 2008 of Skilling Uganda strategy.
The government will launch the new lower secondary education curriculum in which teaching subjects have been reduced from 43 to 21. The new curriculum will be launched next month but the date has not been set.
Under the new curriculum, teachers will compile the learners’ achievements under the formative assessment in the four-year cycle, find an average score and submit it to the Uganda National Examinations Board (Uneb) to contribute at least 20 per cent in the final national examinations grading.
According to Ms Grace Baguma, the executive director of the National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC), the subject content has been reduced by getting rid of obsolete knowledge and integrating related knowledge depending on relevance, societal needs and national goals.
“As a way of avoiding rote learning and cramming of concepts, which is the current practice, the new curriculum emphasises that the learner performs the activities while the teacher facilitates during the learning process,” Ms Baguma told Daily Monitor on Wednesday.
Sources close to NCDC, but who declined to be named, said the new lower secondary curriculum will be rolled out to schools in February 2020 although the Minister of Education, Ms Janet Museveni, is expected to launch it next month.
The approved curriculum will see a school teach 12 subjects at Senior One and Two, of which 11 will be compulsory while one will be from an elective menu (optional).
Students at levels three and four (Senior 3 and 4) will exit with a minimum of eight or maximum of nine subjects, with seven of them compulsory.