As many parents/guardians and learners are still unstipulated on whether schools and higher institutions of learning will re-open or not, the Ministry of Education and Sports through its permanent secretary (PS) Mr. Alex Kakooza has said that it does not have any plan of declaring 2020 as a dead year for all learners in Uganda due to COVID-19 pandemic.
In an interview with journalists last week, Mr. Kakooza revealed that the ministry is doing what it can to make sure that academic institutions are re-opened so that learners can continue with their studies in a safer way to dodge the spread of coronavirus.
“We are not planning on having a dead year. As you are aware, when we closed schools and universities, we were not prepared for that. The biggest issue was how to keep the learners engaged. We came up with different options for learners to revise through TVs, radios, and printed materials,” Kakooza said.
On the issue of primary and secondary self-study reading materials that are being distributed to learners in different parts of the country, Mr. Kakooza explained that those were meant to keep learners busy but they do not have any connection with schools re-opening.
“The reading materials don’t have any new material that learners had not yet covered which means that the Ministry is still preparing for the reopening of schools and that it is just a question of when. There is need for schools to be reopened because we do not want to have the education system clogged as all learners need to go to the next level and interns need to be passed out to join their professions. For example, in the medical field more professionals are needed to assist in the fight against COVID-19 ,’’ He added.
In his conclusion, Mr. Kakooza said that the Ministry is waiting to have Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in place and then schools will be reopened following those procedures.
