The Minister of Education and Sports Janet Museveni has reiterated her recent message, calling up on parents to provide and pack food for their children.
“Education doesn’t only depend on teachers and schools, parents also have a role to play. I call upon parents in rural and urban areas to take up the responsibility to provide meals and care for their children,” Mrs Museveni said today, while officiating at the release of the 2016 results of Primary Leaving Exams (PLE).
Previously, she advised parents against packing cold food for school going children, instead telling them to buy food flasks so that pupils can eat the food when it is hot.
“What I don’t agree with is packing lunch in banana leaves and children eat it cold as lunch. You can buy small flasks for packing lunch so that these children can have it hot,” she was quoted by media.
Meanwhile, Mrs Museveni has said she was pleased with the increasing number of girls gaining education. “We have seen many young girls adopting education, therefore doing away with early marriages and teenage pregnancies. I am happy to announce that since the introduction of Universal Primary Education (UPE), PLE candidature has increased,” she said.
In a related development, the Uganda National Examination Board (UNEB) chairperson, Prof Mary Okwakol, observed that urban areas had increasingly dominated education sector performance in examinations.
Out of the 640,833 candidates who sat from 12,391 centres registered for 2016 PLE, Division one had a total of 63,400 candidates while Division two had 251,787. Boys performed better than girls with 541,089 (87percent) passing compared to 517,889 (86.2percent) the previous year.
“Overall performance shows that male candidates performed better than females but females performed better in English,” she said.
According to Prof Okwakol, this is the first in a series of three examination results to be released; UCE and UACE will follow in that order.
The UNEB Executive Secretary Dan Odongo said 51.3% of the total candidates who completed the primary education cycle were girls.
He however noted that in comparison, Boys performed better than girls with their failure rate at 5.3% and that of girls at 7.7%
He also noted that distinction performance in English rose from 10 to 11.5%, SST from 5.8 to 10.3%, Math from 3.9 to 4.5%, while Science dropped by 7%.
Fort Portal Municipality, Entebbe, Ntungamo, Rukungiri, Jinja, Kabale, Masaka, Mbarara, Lira, Masindi were best districts with 98 percent and above pass rate.
Serere, Namutumba, Bulambuli, Kyankwanzi, Iganga, Kaliro, Mayuge, Kween, Luuka, Buyende were worst performing districts.
