Inside the new lower secondary curriculum

The gov­ern­ment rolled out the new lower sec­ondary ed­u­ca­tion cur­ricu­lum in Feb­ru­ary 2020 with the aim of cre­at­ing meet­ing the learn­ers’ needs es­pe­cially in re­gard to skills train­ing and en­hance­ment.

The Min­is­ter for Ed­u­ca­tion, Janet Mu­sev­eni, in her state­ment to Par­lia­ment, said that the need to re­view the cur­ricu­lum was over­due since it had not been re­vis­ited since the colo­nial ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem was in­tro­duced.

The Min­is­ter re­vealed that the old cur­ricu­lum was churning ­ out grad­u­ates with no prac­ti­cal skills to meet the de­mands in the labour mar­ket.

Subjects

The Na­tional Cur­ricu­lum De­vel­op­ment Cen­tre made ad­just­ments in the teach­ing sub­jects for the lower sec­ondary, for ex­am­ple, teach­ing sub­jects have been re­duced from 43 to 21.

These include;
1. English Language
2. Literature in English
3. Mathematics
4. Biology
5. Chemistry
6. Physics
7. Geography
8. History and Political Education
9. Foreign Languages (French, German, Arabic, Latin, Chinese)
10. Local Languages//sign language
11. Kiswahili
12. Art and Design
13. Religious Education (IRE and CRE)
14. Performing Arts
15. Agriculture
16. Nutrition and Food Technology
17. Entrepreneurship
18. Physical Education
19. Information Communication and Technology (ICT) Skills
20. Technology and Design
21. General Science (for learners with special learning needs)

In the new ap­proved cur­ricu­lum, schools will teach 12 sub­jects at Se­nior One and Two, out of which 11 will be com­pul­sory while one will be from an elec­tive menu (op­tional). Stu­dents at lev­els Three and Four will exit with a min­i­mum of eight or a max­i­mum of nine sub­jects with seven of them com­pul­sory.

Con­se­quently, some sub­jects have taken dif­fer­ent forms: Mu­sic has now in­cluded dance and drama to be­come Per­form­ing Arts; Fine Art has been re­designed to in­clude el­e­ments of de­sign and it is now called Art and De­sign; Tech­ni­cal Draw­ing has been in­te­grated with el­e­ments of wood­work and met­al­work and tech­nol­ogy and it is now called Tech­nol­ogy and De­sign; His­tory has been in­te­grated with Po­lit­i­cal Ed­u­ca­tion; Ac­counts and Com­merce have been in­te­grated in En­tre­pre­neur­ship ed­u­ca­tion, and His­tory has been in­te­grated with Po­lit­i­cal Ed­u­ca­tion.

Un­der the new cur­ricu­lum, teach­ers will com­pile the learn­ers’ achieve­ments un­der the For­ma­tive As­sess­ment in the four-year cy­cle, find an av­er­age score and sub­mit it to the Uganda Na­tional Ex­am­i­na­tions Board to con­tribute at least 20 per cent in the fi­nal na­tional ex­am­i­na­tions grad­ing.

The Chi­nese lan­guage has been added to the menu of for­eign lan­guages while Kiswahili, Phys­i­cal Ed­u­ca­tion and en­tre­pre­neur­ship will be com­pul­sory for all stu­dents in Se­nior One and Two.

 The aim of chang­ing the cur­ricu­lum 

The new ped­a­gogy aims at pro­vid­ing to the learn­ers 21st Cen­tury skills which in­clude; crit­i­cal think­ing, cre­ativ­ity, col­lab­o­ra­tion or team­work, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, in­for­ma­tion lit­er­acy, ICT, and flex­i­bil­ity.

This is ob­vi­ously good news to the na­tion, how­ever, the per­turb­ing ques­tion is whether this will be im­ple­mented amidst the fa­cil­ity in­ad­e­qua­cies in most of the Ugan­dan schools.

For the learn­ers to be­come cre­ative es­pe­cially in ICT and the nat­ural sci­ences, there must be nec­es­sary equip­ment such as well-fur­nished lab­o­ra­to­ries, ef­fec­tive in­ter­net and ob­vi­ously knowl­edge­able train­ers.

These are not pre­sent in most of the rural schools in Uganda which are pre­dom­i­nantly knowl­edge hubs for most of the young peo­ple.

The curriculum also puts emphasis on assessing the learners’ understanding, of key concepts in each subject not just their knowledge;

It also focuses  on the learner’s ability to apply their knowledge in a range of situations and enabling the learner to demonstrate a selection of relevant generic skills;

It also ensures use of  a diversified range of assessment techniques like oral, written, performance, practical skills demonstrations;

It also encourages the development of learners’ abilities to reflect on their own learning and carry out self-assessment.

The formative assessment scores will form part of the total learner score at the end of the cycle. These have been agreed at 20% for formative assessment and 80% for summative.

The teacher is expected to observe the learner for any signs of acquired values, skills and change in attitude and take a record of this in addition to assessing knowledge and understanding.

All these will be considered by the teacher during the learning process and reflected at the compilation of the total formative assessment scores.

Proper and detailed criteria guidelines on how to manage assessment at the school level will be given to schools.

The marks will be captured throughout the 4 years averaged and computed into a score for each individual learner, thereafter the results will be submitted to UNEB for the overall grading of the learner.

The new curriculum allows interested learners to be subjected to the DIT examinations which are skills-based (Nutrition and Food Technology, Entrepreneurship, Agriculture, ICT, Technology and Design, Performing Arts, Art and Design and Physical Education) to allow them acquire a competency certification of level 1 on the Uganda Vocational Qualification Framework (UVQF) for the world of work.