| dc.description.abstract | Majorly; this study was set to investigate whether school, learner and teacher related factors
significantly affected success in implementation of Universal Secondary Education in
Ssembabule district. Proper guidelines, high annual budgetary allocations from the government
and a critical focus from various stakeholders had been directed towards the program over time
(since year 2007), but the outcomes continued to be bad overall. A triangulation of both
qualitative and quantitative methods was used in the study. This study was a cross sectional
survey, where data was collected using both opened and closed questionnaires. The
questionnaires were administered to learners, teachers, head-teachers and parents. The study was
mainly conducted in 10(ten) selected secondary schools in the district, seven were the pure
government USE schools and the 3(three) were private secondary schools but in partnership with
government in implementation of the USE program. Only learners of senior four classes (S.4)
were used as well as parents/guardians who had children in the S.4 class. These were identified
to have had enough experience concerning the program. The quantitative data collected was
analyzed using SPSS package and thematic analysis was used for qualitative data. Findings of
the study showed that apart from competence of the teacher and school rules and regulations all
the other six items of the instrument significantly affected USE activities; so they negatively and
badly impacted on the Universal Secondary Education program in Ssembabule district.
After a thorough analysis of all the responses, among the recommendations included were:
Government should ensure priority and special emphasis in funding secondary education is
placed on inspection, where monitoring and evaluation must strictly be upheld and enforced.
There was need to revive the inspectorate in the ministry of education. Government should
reconsider rhyming relevant policies to the recommendations and requirements by UNESCO
(“government to cater for all learning needs”), for example a critical policy on feeding
participants was discovered wanting. Primary health care one of the crucial elements of a healthy
body which in turn was considered a corner stone of a good education system could not be
enforced especially where children went hungry daily; children should be given lunch. The
existence of boarding schools alongside the USE system was discovered to be a very big
disadvantage to USE; it would therefore be better that all boarding schools are abolished or made
private so that all government facilities are turned to the sub-county schools (USE). | en_US |
