The myriad advantages associated with sustained, high-quality mass education presuppose that it should be enjoyed by all, as espoused in Education for All Goal 2, Millennium Development Goals 2 and 3, and more recently in Sustainable Development Goal 4.
This article explores the boarding school phenomenon in Uganda, where a significant number of long-established prestigious schools are both boarding and government schools. One might assume that this would make them accessible to everyone, but in actual fact they are quite expensive and therefore inaccessible for children from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds and remote rural areas. We explore the extent to which this phenomenon is present and the ranking of boarding facilities in terms of performance and student discipline compared with day schools. We also look at how far boarding schools contravene the Universal Education policy.
In Uganda, students can enroll in a day school, a boarding school or a day and boarding school. They can be either boarders or day students. Parents usually take boarders to school at the beginning of the term and they then return home at the end of the term.
Historical Context of Boarding Schools
Boarding schools were established in the first decade of the 20th century, and were mainly frequented by the children of chiefs, religious leaders and landowners. The philosophy of the colonial masters was that an excellent education of a minority would benefit the masses (Hanson, 2010). The practice was to fund the most successful boarding schools in the wealthiest areas, which contributed to growing social divisions in Uganda.
For the most part, boarding schools were established by Christian missionaries, and were meant to Christianise the indigenous people, teach the colonial language and culture and “emancipate” the young generation from “backward” cultures (Smith, 2009). Between 1877 and 1925, education in Uganda was controlled by missionaries (Nkata, 1999). It was they who decided what would be taught and who and how to teach and determined issues of access and quality in education. Because of the hegemony of the churches, colonial and post-independence governments sought to weaken their influence, but the laxity of the government in the Amin era enabled them to regain control over the education system.
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Before 1989, government met the greater part of the operating costs of boarding schools. A government-commissioned body, the Education Policy Review Commission (EPRC), carried out a study and recommended that all government-aided secondary schools were to be day schools and that if they were boarding schools, the costs of boarding were to be paid by the parents (MoES, 1989). Cabinet endorsed these findings in an Education White Paper (MoES, 1992), and in fact, the current practice is that all boarding costs are the parents’ responsibility.
Boarding schools are rare in the Western World, and the reasons for sending children to them vary. They include the fact that they may be appropriate for struggling children, provide an opportunity for gifted children to share better and offer a way to accommodate children who live at long distances from schools (Cinoglu, 2012; Mason, 1997; Bass, 2013; Cookson & Persell, 1985).
Types of Secondary Schools in Uganda
As can be seen in Figure 2, there are three types of secondary school: boarding schools; day and boarding schools (also called partly boarding); and day schools. Most boarding schools are old-established, prestigious government schools and are therefore expensive. They were founded by the main churches, boast of good infrastructure and performance and are highly selective with regard to admissions.
Day and boarding schools are relatively good schools that are mainly owned by entrepreneurs and were set up to accommodate the children of parents who can pay for the boarding section or the more affordable day section. Conversely, day schools are mainly community-based schools founded by communities and/or government. Most are less well-funded, have fewer teachers being paid for by government and primarily take on students with modest grades at Primary 7 level.
Given that demand for education can be conditioned by supply, the demand constraints are probably exacerbated by inadequacies in the supply. Additionally, the disproportionately higher number of boarding schools in the poorer north and north-east (UBOS, 2010) aggravates inequalities of access in areas where the supply is inadequate and boarding schools are more expensive. The unaffordability of boarding schools and the lack of secondary schools also explain why some children are fostered in other households closer to schools in order to access secondary education (Pilon, 2005).
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The government of Uganda introduced its Universal Post-Primary Education and Training Programme in 2007 as part of its Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP) 2005-2010. The policy was announced by the President during the 2006 presidential elections. The government would provide free tuition to secondary school students, starting with 300,000 primary school graduates in 2007. Parents had to provide exercise books, accommodation, medical care, meals and other school-related materials.
Universalisation of primary education in 1997 enabled many children to enrol in schools, although the completion of primary schooling and the transition to secondary schools have largely remained problematic (MoES, 2016).
The universalisation of secondary education has been impeded by structural challenges in several ways. First, Universal Secondary Education was designed to give places to children who completed primary school, but this category represents less than one-third of eligible children. Second, by 2010, 70% of secondary schools were privately owned (MoES, 2010) and approximately 41% of them were fully or partially boarding schools, the costs of which are borne by the parents as a matter of policy. It should be noted here that these schools are highly valued by many people because of their better academic performance. Third, pupils must sit the Primary Leaving Examination (PLE) in order to be admitted to secondary school, and in particular, those with the best scores are accepted by the prestigious government boarding schools without due consideration being given to children from disadvantaged regions and/or poorer households.
Access and Socioeconomic Factors
As Figure 3 shows, both in 2006 and 2010, the largest number students were enrolled in day secondary schools, then day and boarding schools and lastly full boarding schools. From a supply perspective, most were day schools, followed by day and boarding schools and finally full boarding schools. We argue that while day schooling gained momentum over the five-year period, schooling at boarding schools remained marginal. Using qualitative data, we then explored the phenomenon of boarding schools in further detail to respond to some of the questions that were raised earlier.
Most of the exclusive boarding schools in Uganda are old-established schools that date from colonial times. They were also largely founded by missionaries, but have been taken over by the government. They are known as “government-aided” schools. In practice however, the founding bodies still play a role in managing them, and determine to a large extent who has access to them, the fees, who to employ as teachers, how much they can pay them, etc.
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The UNHS data offer an opportunity to carry out a statistical analysis of the factors affecting access to a boarding school, as presented in Table 2. We explore the factors associated with being a boarder before and after the implementation of the Universal Secondary Education Programme.
We present the results of the logit model in Table 2 and explain the hows and whys using qualitative data. Relationship of the child to the head of household, wealth status of the household, marital status of the head of household and region of residence remained strong covariates of being a boarder.
In 2006, a child from a household with a mid-level income was more likely (0.657***) to access a boarding facility than one from a poor household. In the same vein, a child from a wealthy household was even more likely (1.795***) to access boarding than one from a poor household. In 2010, a child from a household with a mid-level income remained more likely (0.905***) to access boarding than one from a poor household, while a child from a wealthy household was again even more likely (1.528***) to be a boarder. The effect of income on attendance at a boarding school seems not to vary significantly over the five-year period. Indeed, as with the effect of household income on other schooling outcomes, this factor seems to be one of the strongest determinants for accessing a boarding facility.
To understand these findings better, we obtained raw statistics on the costs of accessing various types of secondary school. The fact that boarding schools were expensive is corroborated by the field findings presented in Table 3. Boarding schools were the most expensive type of school in both Northern and Central Uganda. Although these findings are not representative of the country as a whole, they do portray the extent to which boarding schools are “inaccessible”.
In fact, in the central region, it was more difficult to access a government boarding school than a private for-profit secondary school, which suggests that the boarding school phenomenon may be more responsible for recycling disadvantage than private schools. In the central region, the cost of accessing a prestigious “government” secondary boarding school was about 8 times higher than the cost of accessing a government day school.
We recorded data on the occupations of parents by school type for some secondary schools. Again, the fact that boarding schools were almost exclusively a prerogative of the rich is re-echoed (Figure 4).
Since boarding schools are expensive and more selective at the time of entry, they are mostly “demanded” by parents who are able to enrol their children in good primary schools - that is, private or government boarding schools - so that they can obtain good grades. In addition, in the absence of almost any regulation from the government, most schools fix their fees at their discretion, sometimes to top up teachers’ salaries, to the detriment of poor children.
In Uganda, access to boarding schools would be every parent’s wish, given their good performance levels. Access is rationed by the grades children obtain, however, which in turn depend on the quality and/or cost of the school attended at primary level. Because there are no subsidies to enable poor children to access boarding schools, parents in all parts of the country can place their children in boarding schools anywhere as long as their children have the right grades.
Given that these schools are long-established and prestigious, they usually prefer to admit the students with the best grades. In practice, however, only a proportion of the students are admitted on merit, while an equally large number are admitted because of their parents’ social, political and religious connections. In most cases, students who enrol in one type of school usually remain there, since among other things, their enrolment is contingent on their parents’ ability to pay.
Most day schools are community schools that receive inadequate support from government.
This study uses a mixed methods approach. It mainly uses quantitative data from the Uganda National Household Surveys (UNHS) for 2005/2006 and 2009/2010, data from the Ugandan Education Management Information System (EMIS), primary data from selected schools and qualitative data from key stakeholders in the education sector.
The 2005/2006 and 2009/2010 surveys collected information on the “current school attendance status” of children and the type of school they were attending. We looked at pupils from 13 to 24 years of age at secondary school and above at the time of the surveys and the type of school attended. There are three types of school: i) day schools, ii) boarding schools and iii) day and boarding schools. Using information from the “distance to school” variable collected from day pupils alone, we were able to identify the numbers of day students versus boarders in category iii). We then created a variable with a binary outcome of “boarders versus day students”.
We collected qualitative data in February and March 2013, largely from Northern Uganda but with a smaller proportion from the central region. The northern and central regions are the most educationally deprived and best-endowed regions, respectively (Kakuba, 2015). Figure 2 shows that the central region had a larger number of day secondary schools and the north had the smallest. We also carried out key informant interviews in order to investigate a variety of education-related issues, including the views of parents, teachers and school administrators on issues of equity and access to boarding secondary schools. The interlocutors for the key informant interviews included 3 male Ministry of Education officials in the Greater Gulu district, 10 male head teachers, 13 male and 6 female teachers, 14 female and 12 male parents and 1 male official from an NGO that sponsors children at secondary and post-secondary levels in greater Northern Uganda.
The main dependent variable is “being a boarder or a day student”. We selected independent variables based on the guide for analysis of survey education data (UIS et al., 2004) with the aim of exploring the extent to which access to boarding schools was predicted by parents’ socioeconomic status. The independent variables were household wealth status, rural or urban residence, region of residence, relationship of the child to the head of household, child’s gender, education level and marital status of the head of household. Other variables included gender of the head of household, household size, number of children under the age of five and the number of adults in a household. With regard to the quantitative data, we carried out multivariate analyses, the results of which we present. From this, we determined the aggregate net effect of independent variables on the probability that a child at secondary school level was being educated at a boarding school. We used the multiple logistic regression model because the dependent variable was binary (Bressoux, 2010): that is, a student was enrolled either at a boarding school or in a boarding section or at a day school or in a day section.
Boarding School Life
The school residences are a multi-cultural community made up of learners from many nations and a variety of social- economic background. This provides the challenge and opportunity for students to form friendship that may not be possible in less diverse environments and learn to live together successfully and productively focusing on our commonalities rather than our differences.
The staff of the residences is committed to providing a positive learning environment as well as a safe, clean home-away- from -home for our students. Students are encouraged to develop an ethical and moral lifestyle in keeping with the generation principles and standards of the school.
Before applying for residence you should be aware of the following:
- Learners are not accommodated in single occupancy, learners share rooms.
- Learners do their own laundry.
- Beddings (bed sheets, blankets, duvets, pillows etc) are not provided.
- Toiletries including soap and toilet papers are not provided.
- Female visitors are not permitted in the male residence rooms nor are male visitors permitted in the female residence rooms.
- The use and possession of tobacco, Alcohol, weapons and illegal drugs is strictly forbidden.
- Meals are provided at the school campus.
- Cooking is not permitted.
- A supportive and respectful attitude towards the warden/Matron and resident assistants is expected from the resident learners.
- Modesty in dress is expected and jewellery is discouraged expect on weekends.
- Electrical gadgets i.e. mobile phones i.e. Computers, I pods etc., have to be registered before they are allowed in the boarding houses.
- Boarding houses are out of bounds during class hours.
- Sharing personal items is discouraged.
- Noise of any nature .i.e. shouting, TV and Radio Volumes must be minimal.
- Theft of any nature is Punishable by expulsion.
- Indecent behavior towards one another is strictly forbidden.
- A Learner Leaving for a boarding house should be in the company of either the matron or the house warden. This applies to reporting to School as well for lessons.
- Boarding houses are out of bounds to the non- resident learners.
- All visitors to the boarding houses should first report to the administration for clearance.
- The Boarding house’s property must be respected and should be left intact in the form it is found in.
Rainbow International School is an internationally minded school. Our family-focused approach allows us to work with ‘Parents as Partners’ to truly understand each child and to ensure they feel understood, valued and secure. This helps us to nurture their individuality by encouraging meaningful relationships amongst peers, teachers and the wider school community. We understand that every child is unique. We are committed to developing a culture of learning where pupils seek to be the best that they can be. By working together on an individual level, we inspire our pupils to make sure they reach their full potential.
Instead of typical dorms, residents are housed in luxurious boarding houses. In boarding homes, students coexist as a family while working together under the guidance of boarding matrons and wardens, who are also teachers. Although we do accept weekly boarding, students coming from a distance are housed entirely. Our pastoral staff in boarding homes provides a friendly and encouraging environment for students to learn.
Since the media often focuses on spectacular stories that scarcely portray boarding sections as they really are, you won’t know unless you properly investigate us. Students are given the chance and challenge to forge friendships that they would not be able to in settings with fewer diversity and to learn how to coexist peacefully and productively by concentrating on our similarities rather than our differences. The staff of the residences is dedicated to giving our students both a supportive study environment and a clean, safe home away from home. In accordance with the generational values and standards of the school, students are encouraged to build an ethical and moral lifestyle.
Map of Uganda with Regions
You should be informed of the following before applying for residency:
- Students do not stay in single-occupancy rooms; instead, they share rooms.
- The washing is done by the students.
- No bedding is supplied, including bed sheets, blankets, duvets, and pillows.
- No toiletries, such as soap and paper towels, are offered.
- Male guests are not allowed in the rooms where the men live, and female visitors are not allowed in the rooms where the women live.
- It is completely prohibited to use or possess any type of weapon, alcohol, cigarettes, or illicit narcotics.
- On the site of the school, meals are served.
- Cooking is prohibited.
- Residents are required to treat the warden/matron, resident assistants, and other residents with respect.
- It is customary to dress modestly, with the exception of the weekends, and jewelry is discouraged.
- Electrical devices, such as mobile phones, computers, iPods, and other devices, must be registered before they are permitted in boarding homes.
- Boarding houses are off limits when classes are in session.
- Sharing private things is not advised.
- Noise, regardless of kind. Shouting, TV, and radio volume must all be kept to a minimum.
- Any type of theft is punishable by eviction.
- It is definitely prohibited for people to act indecently toward one another.
- A Student The matron or the house warden should accompany anyone leaving for a boarding house. This also pertains to showing up for classes at school.
- The non-resident students are not permitted in the boarding homes.
- All guests at the boarding homes must first check in with the administration for authorization.
- Property belonging to the boarding home must be treated with care and kept exactly as found.
Day in a life of a Student in Uganda 🇺🇬 🏫 [Alone in Africa EP3]
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