Who accesses secondary schooling in Uganda; Was the universal secondary education policy ubiquitously effective?

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Abstract

This paper explores predictors of accessing secondary education for children in Uganda given the universal secondary education policy of 2007. This is done for; rural Uganda, Kampala and other urban areas given increasing urbanization of rural areas that assumes urban homogeneity in heterogeneous situations. We apply the logit model onto Uganda census data to predict access given individual, household and community variables. We discover that only 22% of children aged 13–18 were enrolled at secondary and that demand and supply related predictors are moderated by the socio-economic status of households to influence schooling outcomes all along the education ladder.

Introduction

While access to basic education lies at the heart of development (Lewin, 2007), sustained and meaningful access to education is critical for, inter alia; long term improvements in incomes and productivity (Cremin and Nakabugo, 2012), expansion of the tax base (Majgaard and Mingat, 2012) as well as reduction in inequality and intergenerational cycles of poverty (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009). It is also known to catalyse the demographic transition (Charbit and Kébé, 2010; NPC, 2018), promote preventive health care and enhance women emancipation and democratisation (Henaff, 2006).

Globally, secondary education is of increasing interest to academia, policy makers as well International organizations. It is in this spirit that the 2011 Edition of Global Education Digest by UNESCO Institute of Statistics was entitled “Focus on secondary education: the next great challenge”. Besides, although economic research has traditionally found that private rates of return to education decline at higher levels, recent evidence suggests that, in many cases, rates of return increase with the level of education (The World Bank, 2008).

A closer look at the myriad of advantages associated with quality mass education presupposes that it is enjoyed by all as espoused in Education for All Goal 2, Millennium Development Goals 2 and 3 and more recently, Sustainable Development Goal 4. Uganda is one of the first countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to introduce Universal Primary Education in 1997 and Universal Secondary Education in 2007. Indeed the main emphasis of the 2004–2015 Education Sector Strategic Plan was not only to improve access to quality education at primary but also ensure access to post primary education and progress through the school system (MoES, 2004).

Uganda’s education system is based on a four-tier model: Primary Education; Secondary Education, Business, Technical and Vocational Education and Training (BTVET) and Tertiary Education. This model has existed since the early 1960s. It consists of seven years of primary education for pupils aged 6–12, followed by four years of lower (ordinary) and two years of upper (advanced) secondary education. At the end of primary seven, children sit the primary leaving examination (PLE). Graded pupils obtain a Primary Leaving Certificate and those with the highest marks are admitted to secondary education. Primary school completers can also follow a three-year crafts course at a technical school. After secondary education, students may go to university, teacher colleges or BTVET institutions (De Kemp and Eilor, 2008).

As part of the implementation of the Poverty Eradication Action Plan 2005–2010 (PEAP), Uganda was the first country in Sub-Saharan Africa to introduce the Universal Post Primary Education and Training Policy (UPPET) in 2007. Under the auspices of the policy that later took on the appellation “Universal Secondary Education (USE) Policy”, government was to provide free tuition to secondary school students starting with 300,000 primary school graduates in 2007. Parents, on the other hand, were to provide exercise books, accommodation, medical care, meals and other scholastics. In addition, government was to ensure that every sub-county gets a secondary school to improve access to secondary education. In order to investigate factors associated with access to secondary schooling, we were guided by Lewin’s model as elucidated hereunder;

The conceptualisation of access to secondary was informed by the CREATE conceptual framework on access, equity and transitions (Fig. 1). It illustrates how enrolments decline through the primary grades especially in low enrolment countries and how those attending irregularly and achieving poorly fall into the “at risk” zones (Lewin, 2007).

This framework maps 6 zones that are called “zones of exclusion” and provides insights into the probability that irregular attendance, repetitions and low achievement at a given level do not only impact retention at that level but negatively affect progression to the next level. Zone 1 comprises children who never attend school. It includes those who could attend existing schools but do not, and those who are excluded by livelihoods, location, civil status, disability, social stigma or other vulnerabilities. Zone 2 includes the majority of children who are excluded after initial entry, who drop out of school and fail to complete a full cycle. Zone 3 includes those in school but at risk of dropping out, most obviously as a result of; being overage for grade, low achievement and poor attendance. These children can be described as “silently excluded” since they are enrolled but may learn little, attend irregularly, and/ or are overage. Zone 4 contains those who fail to transit to secondary education as a result of failing to be selected, being unable to afford costs, or located far from a secondary school, or otherwise excluded. Zone 5 includes those dropping out of secondary grades. Zone 6 contains those at risk of dropping out from secondary school for reasons given under Zone 3. Zone 0 captures those excluded from pre-school. This framework seems to be relevant to this study as it approaches access to secondary schooling not as a one-time event affected by factors at that time but as a result of several other factors at the lower level that may be related to, inter alia, age at initial access for those who manage to enrol, regularity of attendance, meaningful learning, retention etc.

We selected independent variables basing on the framework for analysing education data from secondary sources as guided by UNESCO (UIS et al., 2004) and presented in Fig. 2.

Efforts by the Ugandan government notwithstanding, structural bottlenecks that stand in the way of universalisation of secondary education still exist as elucidated hereunder;

First, despite the universalisation of primary and secondary education in 1997 and 2007 respectively, about 70% of children who enrol in primary one never complete primary seven and this has persisted for close to two decades as can be seen in Fig. 3. This is close to what has been observed in the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa (Lewin and Akyeampong, 2009).

Second; Pupils have to pass the Primary Leaving Examination to go to secondary and yet better performance at this level has been an almost exclusive privilege of children that have largely attended private and or boarding primary schools in the urban areas. The quality of learning has largely been wanting in public schools (Twaweza East Africa 2019, 2019, Twaweza East Africa 2019, 2019), partly due to poor motivation of good teachers that have tended to be urban based and confined to private schools. Besides, due lack of fees and other requirements, increased demand for labor at household level and teenage pregnancy as well as early marriages for females, the transition rate to secondary has averaged about 67% between 2007 and 2015 (MoES, 2016). While technical education would give skills to many children that drop out of school prematurely, only about 4% of all children in post primary institutions are enrolled in BTVET institutions (Ministry of Education and Sports, 2016). This is explained by lack of interest in technical education where courses therein are perceived as being for less bright students (Ssekamwa, 1997).

Third; About 62% of all the schools at secondary level are privately owned (MoESTS, 2015) and this has implications for equity (Woodhead et al., 2013) and learning (Twaweza East Africa 2019, 2019, Twaweza East Africa 2019, 2019) and hence progression for children from poorer households and the rural areas.

Fourth; Given that about 41% of Government secondary schools, especially the old prestigious schools are boarding schools and that both policy and practice are that all costs especially, the costs of boarding are borne by parents (MoES, 1992), these schools are often as expensive, as private schools. Besides, access to the schools is so selectively discriminative that it is children of the middle class that have largely attended urban private and or expensive boarding primary schools and performed well that join them.

Fifth; in about 43% of the schools that are under the Universal Secondary Education (MoESTS, 2015) arrangement where government supports parents in educating their children, the contribution of parents is three to four times that of government (C. Kakuba, 2014). These schools are largely community based and mainly recruit locally targeting children that did not perform well at primary seven. In these schools, performance is not as good as in the other categories of schools that are private and or boarding. These schools are comparable to the community schools in Tanzania (Bonini, 2012).

Finally, by 2008 [for lack of more recent data], 271 sub-counties (smaller local government units in a district) had neither a public nor private secondary school and while this has been blamed on the inadequacy of Uganda’s budget, it has negative implications for access by many children from poorer households in the rural areas.

In the face of universalized education, what households enrol, which children at secondary and where? Has universalized secondary education since 2007 impacted inequalities in accessing secondary schooling? Did both the impact and inequalities vary by place of residence? These, and several others, are some of the questions that triggered interest into this kind of study. The novelty of this paper is threefold. It : (i) uses census data that is more comprehensive in coverage (ii) tackles access to secondary education in a holistic manner rather than equate it to transition and (iii) explores predictors of access for; rural Uganda, Kampala (the capital) and other urban areas. Point (iii) is important as Uganda was between 2002 and 2014 characterised by creation of many municipalities and town councils (UBOS, 2015) even when conditions of living are not necessarily better in the new rural cum urban settings, now defined as urban. These were mainly curved out for political expediency at local and national levels. The definition of urban is thus administrative or legalistic but in reality, many rural cum urban spaces exhibit with rural characteristics. These again cannot be equated to Kampala, which is much more urban than even the older upcountry towns. The rapid “urbanisation” of rural areas has brought about a lot of heterogeneities in the urban areas that lumping them together would not yield robust and relevant findings.

The main objective of this study is to isolate the predictors of accessing secondary schooling for the children of secondary school age in Uganda. The Specific objectives are to:-

  • i

    Explore the effect of individual level factors on the probability of accessing secondary schooling.

  • ii

    Document the effect of factors linked to the household head on the probability of accessing secondary schooling.

  • iii

    Investigate the effect of household characteristics on the probability of accessing secondary schooling.

  • iv

    Study the effect of education supply-related factors on the probability of accessing secondary schooling.

  • v

    Isolate the factors that are most associated with accessing secondary schooling by place of residence

Section snippets

Data and methods

We mainly used Census Data for 2014 where information had been collected on the schooling status of household members aged 3 years and above and several other individual, household and community level factors that have been hypothesised and documented to influence schooling outcomes (CEPED et al., 1999; UIS et al., 2004). In this paper, we delimit the study to the population of children aged 13–18 years, which correspond to the official ages for secondary schooling in Uganda. We equally used

The effect of Individual level factors on the probability of accessing secondary school

Findings from Table 2 show that females were more likely to have accessed secondary school than their male counterparts. This was found to be true for Kampala, other urban areas and rural Uganda. In the same vein, non-orphans were more likely to be enrolled at secondary than their orphaned counterparts again in Kampala, other urban areas and rural Uganda. Biological children to the household head were more likely to be enrolled at secondary than the household head, other relatives and

Discussion

In this paper, access to secondary is not an event but a process and to predict it as if it were access to primary is to miss the point. It should be remembered that somebody of secondary school age may have failed to access secondary because of:- i) failure to access primary, ii) still being enrolled at primary despite attaining the official age for secondary, but more so, iii) dropping out of primary. We thus also include factors related to primary schooling as these could be explaining

Conclusions and policy recommendations

Despite the existence of a policy on universal secondary education in Uganda since 2007, progression in primary school as well as access to and equity in secondary schooling remain elusive targets. Access to secondary education remains inequitable between individual children within the same household, the same community and above all, vary by geographical location. Access to secondary remains an almost exclusive prerogative for about one fifth of children in the eligible group, the ones from

Authors statement

We, authors of this manuscript confirm that it is an original piece of work and has not been submitted anywhere else for publication except to the International Journal of Educational Development.

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