Secondary schools across the country will continue teaching the current O-level curriculum for the next four years.
In an interview with The Observer last week, Grace Baguma, the director of the Uganda National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC), said they had agreed to discard the curriculum that had been developed and begin afresh.
“We have gone back to the drawing board to look at the content in the current curriculum but also pick some good experiences of what we had done in the new curriculum that was dropped,” Baguma said. “We are going to re-work things. If we can work quickly and train the teachers, I see a new curriculum come in 2020.”
In 2008, NCDC started work on updating the curriculum, following concerns that it was outdated, having been adopted in 1965. By December 2016, the curriculum was ready for piloting in 20 schools. However, a meeting held at State House Entebbe last year persuaded the president to halt the entire process for more consultations.
The president then directed each of the nine public universities to second a lecturer to work with NCDC on the proposed reforms to the curriculum. On Friday last week, Baguma, together with other NCDC officials, presented a paper to the ministry’s top management on how they would reorganise the curriculum.
Asked if this was not a big setback, Baguma said: “It is indeed a big setback but unavoidable. When you prepare a curriculum and stakeholders say no, you have to go back and revisit their concerns.”
She said since education stakeholders did not appreciate the learning area approach which involved merging of some science subjects, they have agreed to go back to subject approach.
However, while names of some subjects will be retained, the content of some subjects will be changed in order to have a competence-based curriculum that looks at the learner’s competences and promotes the 21st century skills.
According to Baguma, the current curriculum is more of cognitive domains and examination-driven, thus encouraging cramming by learners to pass exams.
“Ideally, a curriculum should not be static and must be revised every five years. But due to the huge cost implications, we have for long worked with a curriculum given to us by colonialists,” she said.
NCDC has requested for at least Shs 5.3bn from government to start on the review of the curriculum for four years.
SUBJECTS
Initially, there were proposals to drop at least six subjects including agriculture, home economics, technical drawing, metal/wood work, building practice and music to be taught only in technical/farm institutes and polytechnic institutes.
But Baguma said though dropping some subjects like typewriting is absolute, she envisages agriculture being retained on the O-level curriculum.
“The president had also proposed that agriculture be combined with biology but agriculture is a key subject that even children who are not going to technical schools should learn,” she said. “Taking such a subject to farm schools will mean leaving out many children on what is the backbone of Uganda’s economy.”
She added that other subjects will further be discussed during the reviews but agriculture “cannot just be thrown here and there. It must be a standalone subject.”
As schools wait for a new curriculum by 2020, NCDC also wants to bring on board earth and space science as a learning area to prepare children for the global village.
nangonzi@observer.ug