The Masaka District education department in Uganda says it will deny automatic promotion to pupils under Universal Primary Education (UPE) who don’t regularly attend lessons.
The authorities say the move will help them to fish out lazy learners who contribute to poor grades in national exams.
Only two weeks ago, the Uganda National Examinations Board (Uneb) released the 2022 PLE results, revealing that the district’s candidates performed poorly compared to the previous year.
Masaka District education officer, Gerald Nsambu says there was a decline in the performance of learners in the area, attributing this to the annexation of the best-performing schools to Masaka City.
“Some of the big schools we had are currently in Nyendo-Mukungwe and Kimaanya-Kabonera municipalities, it is like this because some parts of the district were annexed to Masaka City in 2020,” Nsambu stated.
He added that the promotion of learners will now be based on the academic performance of the learners and continuous assessment of activities in class.
Automatic promotion policy has been a subject of debate among district officials, teachers and schools as some believe it undermines the general performance of the government’s free education programme.
It was introduced in 2011 and has been one of the government’s most controversial education policies.