The government of Uganda has agreed to open Universities and other tertiary institutions as a first step towards reopening the Education sector after 18months of closure.
According to a plan issued by the Ministry of Education and Sports, higher institutions of learning will be the first to open to students starting this October amid strict anti-Covid-19 regulations.
This reopening will pave way for the reopening of other learning institutions across the board with emphasis to learners that have been out of school for longer periods such as Kindergarten, Primary and O’level learners.
In a bid to enhance Covid-19 surveillance and management, the ministry has proposed to put heads of these learning institutions in charge of implementing checks and compilation of data and working closely with health workers and the Ministry to curb the spread of the deadly virus.
Further more the ministry indicates that the current curriculum will be reviewed in order to extract the core competences and the rest of the topics be used as examples due to the short time the learners will be having in school.
The ministry has advised learning institutions to put up temporary structures to carter for the large numbers of learners and as well enable physical distance.
The ministry of education hopes to provide learning institutions with learning materials and provide support to teachers with abridged materials to accelerate learning.
However, on this proposal, the general secretary Uganda National Teachers Union (UNATU), Filbert Baguma, says this measure could still be difficult to apply for the schools that are highly populated incase the SOPs are not revised.
‘’We agree with the strategies and only need to harmonize on some of them especially for the schools with big numbers of learners,” Baguma says.
However, educators and learners are required to get vaccinated against Covid-19 to see the full reopening of learning institutions.
About The Author
