Janet Museveni, Minister of Education

The Minister for Education, Janet Museveni, has pledged to strengthen monitoring in Primary Teachers’ Colleges so that they can meet the required standards.

She made the remarks on Monday at the release of the 2016 grade III certificate exam results where 10,131 out of 16,273 candidates who registered passed the Grade III exams.

The performance was better in all subjects including Maths and English that were previously performed poorly during the 2015 season.

Apart from Math with pass rate of 76%, the candidates managed to pass the rest of the 12 subjects’ local language, social studies, agriculture, and integrated science with a pass mark of over 99%.

Best performing Primary Teacher Colleges were Bundibugyo, Rakai, Bushenyi, Ndegeya (Masaka), Canon Apollo (Fort Portal) with an over-all pass of over 85%.

Meanwhile, the worst performing colleges were all private and these included; Busoga University PTC, St. Baptist Ggaba, Namutamba with below 40% overall pass rate.

The released results also indicated that a total of 5, 600 candidates failed the exams.

Museveni who is also the first lady of Uganda has urged stake holders to ensure that all PTCs including private colleges meet the minimum standards if they are to realize an improvement in performance.

The Secretary General of Uganda National Teachers Union, James Tweheyo, together with he  chairperson of PTC Principals, Beatrice Byakutaga and Dr. Godfrey Bakaira the head of teacher training section at Kyambogo University took time to explain reasons for the poor performance of  private colleges in the country.