Factors Affecting the Successful Implementation of Universal Secondary Education (USE) in Ssembabule district - Uganda

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).