By Mulengera Reporters
The Amanya Mushega-led Education Policy Review Commission (EPRC), majority of whose ideas are likely to be accepted by Education Minister Janet Museveni and the entire government, has proposed that 5-6 years becomes the age at which a child attends nursery level education training.
The Mushega Commission has also proposed that such nursery training becomes compulsory for all learners before being enrolled to Primary One. And it strictly has to last for one year and not three as it has been happening.
This simply means that all the stuff that the children have been taking in through baby class, middle class and eventually top class will have to be re-aligned and rationalized to be taught to them in just one year. Proprietors of schools and such early childhood dsvelopment (ECD) learning centers will most likely not like this because it deprives them of colossal sums of money they have inappropriately been earning from desperate parents.
This proposal is aimed at reducing school or classroom environment-related stress on the youngsters while ensuring that parents live or stay with their children longer in the home environment as opposed to throwing them to the world. The idea is to also revitalize the family as a unit where a lot of learning and character formation for a child has to take place.
The problem is that many Ugandans these days are single parents who have to balance parenting and work, which is why ECD centers had become convinient in terms of having where to leave one’s child or children as the single mother or father goes to hassel.
The alternative would be maids and other home-based caregivers but good ones of them are these days hard to come-by. Such complications could diminish the appeal of some of these Mushega Commission recommendations and reduce on the report’s acceptability and implementation.
Gratefully, the same report will have to be vigorously debated in the public and among the country’s top leadership members both in Parliament and Cabinet etc. It’s out of that vigorous debating that the government will come up with a White Paper to guide new policy formation and the rolling out of the badly-needed reforms on our education system.
The same Mushega report proposes to re-align the amount of time that learners have to spend at ECD centers (aka nursery schools) per day. ECD/nursery learners, who must be not less than 5 years old, will have to report for school at 8am and leave at midday.
Their primary countersparts (proposed to be in primary for 6 years and not 7 anymore) will have the same reporting time and leave at 3pm. It’s only those in secondary (S1-S6) that will stay up to 4pm and go home; having reported at 8am.
The report also proposes abolition of boading schooling for all learners of P4 and below. This implies that all children or learners of nursery and of P1-P4 must comute from home and can only come to live in the boading section from P5 onwards. The idea is to increase bonding with parents at home and other family members.
The Mushega-led panel of experts indicate in their EPRC report that keeping children home until P4 will also accelerate their capabilities to learn and fluently communicate in their mother language or tongue.
Led by Amanya Mushega, who was deputized by chief government planner Dr. Joseph Muvawala, the EPRC members were put together in May 2021 by Education Minister Janet Museveni who hoped to levearage their findings to work out a comprehensive package comprising of a raft of reforms that have to be implemented in order to change things and make Uganda’s education system align and comply with rapid changes that are taking place in the contemporary world of work and much more.(For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
