The Secretary of the Education Service Commission, Dr. Asuman Lukwago, has strongly criticized Ignatius Koomu, the LC5 Chairperson of Nakaseke District, for ambushing Primary Seven teachers with an unannounced assessment test. This contentious test followed the disappointing 2023 Primary Leaving Examination results, with Mathematics being the poorest performing subject.
In March 2024, Koomu mandated that teachers undergo these tests to address the poor performance, leading to a contentious outcome. The assessment revealed that seven out of nine teachers tested failed to achieve 50% of the marks. The poorest performer secured only 27%, while the highest score was 92%.
Dr. Lukwago addressed this issue while appearing before Parliament’s Committee on Commissions, Statutory Authorities, and State Enterprises (COSASE). He emphasized that the rules of any examination require candidates to be notified in advance, which was not the case in Nakaseke. This lack of notice, he argued, contributed to the low scores, including the 27% result.
In response to a question from Buzaaya County MP Martin Muzaale about the lessons learned from the Nakaseke incident, Dr. Lukwago explained that the results of such an ambush test are not a reliable measure of the teachers' quality. The Commission, he noted, is responsible for appointing, developing, maintaining, and improving the quality of personnel in the education sector.
“The outcome of the examination isn’t reliable until we understand the standards that were used because examinations are set by people who are qualified to set them,” Dr. Lukwago stated. He suggested that tests designed to prove a point might be intentionally made more difficult.
Dr. Lukwago further argued that an education system should not operate like an ambush but rather through a conventional process. He illustrated his point by comparing the situation to inviting lawyers to take an impromptu exam, which they had previously passed, but now under surprise conditions. Such a scenario, he noted, would likely result in higher failure rates.
“To be fair, really, I have been in education; I wouldn’t imagine that education should be like an ambush. It should be a conventional process. Everybody, you can invite these lawyers and say we want you to do this exam today, even if you bring them the exam from the Law Development Centre which they passed, sometimes the failure rate may be higher than when they did those exams. So for sure, it wasn’t fair, but humans can also learn from unfair situations,” Dr. Lukwago added.
This incident highlights the importance of fair and transparent processes in assessing educational professionals and underscores the challenges of addressing poor academic performance through unorthodox means.
