Africa-Press – Uganda. The education ministry is set to retrain 21,000 teachers in Senior One, Two and Three teachers will be retooled and others given additional short courses; as part of the process to roll out the new Ordinary Level curriculum.
The training will be for teachers in both Government and private schools around the country and will be handled by the education ministry hired personnel.
The revised O Level curriculum came into usage starting this academic year; save for the disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The state minister for higher education, Dr John Chrysostom Muyingo, on the sidelines of the 27th education sector review, he revealed that 13,000 teachers for Senior Three will be retooled, and an additional 8,000 teachers in Senior One and Two will be given continuous professional development programmes.
“This will be done, to enable the teachers to improve their skills and know exactly what needs to be taught, under the new curriculum in lower secondary,” Muyingo said.
The Government, according to the education ministry’s permanent secretary Alex Kakooza “Always does these trainings to make sure the teachers are up to the standard that is expected.”
“In order to improve the teaching ability of teachers, last year we retrained science and Mathematics teachers under the SESEMAT programme. We had planned to train 3,800 and by the end of the financial year, a total of 2,377 teachers had been trained in science, mathematics, and digital science in Central and North Western region.”
There have been other retraining sessions done in the teaching of Kiswahili and ICT in schools in the past. However, this time, the focus has been put on the lower curriculum.
Grace Baguma the director for the National Curriculum Development Centre says that the move to retrain teachers “Is meant to help them understand what the curriculum developers intended as they crafted the curriculum.”
“So much of the content was changed, and the way it should be taught also changed, and this explains why we are retraining the teachers,” Baguma explained.
What is the new curriculum?
A student is expected to study a maximum of 12 subjects at both Senior One and Two of which, 11 are compulsory.
In Senior Three and Four, a student is expected to study a minimum of eight and a maximum of nine subjects with only seven compulsory ones.
With the old setting, the student would take a maximum of 10 subjects. Under the new curriculum, classroom teaching time has been reduced to five hours a day. Lessons start at 8:30 am and end at 2:50 pm, including lunch breaks.
The remaining time will be used by students for hands-on projects, research, project work, clubs, games, and sports and have time for revision lasting one hour and 40 minutes. The school day will end at 4:30 pm.
On assessment, all classroom works, games, and sports will account for 20% of the marks at the end of the O Level cycle.
The Uganda Certificate of Education exams will account for 80% of marks a student gets at O Level.
