Africa-Press – Uganda. On Monday, February 1, Education and Sports minister Janet Kataaha Museveni will officiate the Senior One selection exercise. The activity will drag on until Tuesday, February 2, as multiple secondary schools select post-primary learners who will be joining them.
In the upcoming Monday exercise, the majority of the schools—especially the traditional giants—will be looking for candidates who excelled in their examinations with between Aggregate 4 and 8.
Elsewhere, their government Universal Secondary Education (USE) counterparts will—per past precedents—consider candidates who scored between Aggregate 4 and 28.
Top secondary schools
These traditional schools (some government-aided and purely private), have in the past 10 years maintained their status quo in terms of performance at the Ordinary Level (Uganda Certificate of Education or UCE), according to statistics from Uneb.
Some of them include Uganda Martyrs SS, Namugongo in Wakiso District, which had all its 359 students pass in Division One, with 26 candidates with 8-in-8, 16 with 9-in-8, and four with 10-in-10 in last year’s UCE. This was followed by St. Marys’ Secondary School, Kitende in Wakiso, which had 452 candidates out of their total 492 candidatures, passing in Division One and 12 of these with 8-in-8.
Other secondary schools that had some of their candidates scoring 8-in-8, according to the 2022 Uneb UCE ranking are Kings College, Budo (Wakiso), MaryHill High School (Mbarara), and Mt St Mary’s Namagunga (Mukono).
Others are Naalya Secondary School, Namugongo, St Mary’s College, Kisubi, Kibuli Secondary School, Mandela Secondary School, Hoima, and Seeta High School.
There were additional secondary schools that registered less than five students with 8-in-8 aggregates but got a good number of divisions one and two, according to Uneb.
They are St Joseph’s Secondary School, Naggalama, Trinity College, Nabbingo, Light Academy Secondary School, Makerere High School, Migadde, Namilyango College, Ndejje Secondary School, Seroma Christian High School, St Henry’s College, Kitovu, Victoria High School, Bishop’s Senior School, Bp Cipriano Kihangire Secondary School and Iganga Secondary School.
Others are Kawempe Muslim Secondary School, Kigezi High School, Mengo Secondary School, Notre Dame Academy, Buseesa, St Andrea Kahwa’s College, Hoima, St Jude Secondary School, Masaka, St Lawrence Secondary Schools Sonde, and Teso College-Aloet.
These schools have, however, maintained their cut-off points ranging between four and six for boys and four and seven for girls in central, as well as some giants in upcountry and between four and 15 in others.
The secondary schools have also on several occasions condemned the government for dictating the cut-off points for them which make them admit students they would not have desired to have.
Current PLE performance
But basing on the current performance where traditional primary school giants did not get many Aggregate 4 to 8 as has been the case in past years, Mr Hasadu Kirabira, the chairperson of the National Private Education Institutions Association (NPEIA), told that a revision of the cut-off points by secondary schools will be “inevitable.”
This, he further argued, is “because if you don’t do so, where will you get the students from, as we have all seen P7 candidates perform poorly.”
He proceeded to add thus: “As schools, we are going to sit with the Ministry of Education and Uneb so that we agree and slow down the cut-off points to meet the performance levels.”
Despite hiking the cut-off points from 4-6 for boys and 4-7 for girls last year, the majority of the students were left without schools after their first choice schools admitted less than 10 percent of those who had applied.
Iganga Secondary School, for example, admitted only 240 students out of the 2,029 PLE candidates who had named it their first secondary school choice.
Kibuli Secondary School also raised its cut-off points to six for boys and seven for girls, hence admitting only 200 PLE candidates out of the 1,954 candidates who had chosen it. Of the 4,311 candidates who chose Mengo SS as their first choice last year, only 600 did not surpass their Aggregate 6 for boys and 7 for girls’ cut-off points respectively.
Others were Kings College Budo, Gayaza High School, Mengo Senior Secondary School, Mt St Mary’s Namagunga.
The majority of the candidates were either forced to go to some upcountry schools or join the government-owned and aided Universal Secondary Education (USE) schools. Mpanga SS raised the cut-off points to Aggregate 7 for boys and 12 for girls, up from 14 and 18, respectively.
In an interview with this publication on Thursday, Mr John Chrysostom Muyingo, the State Minister for Higher Education, said the government will sit with school head teachers and ensure that the selection is fair to all students across all regions.
“The selection begins with the best performers and afterwards we come up with another formula,” he said.
Performance
The Uganda National Examination Board (Uneb) on Thursday released the 2023 Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE) results, with their dataset indicating that 11.7 percent of the 736,931 candidates passed in the first grade.
The rest passed in other divisions, including: 336,507 in Division Two, 156,290 in Three, and 69,283 in Division Four. The failures numbered 88,269.
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