NABOTU News

August 27, 2008: Declining standards in Schools blamed on poor access to supplementary reading materials

On Thursday 21 August 2008, I participated in the final dissemination workshop which was organised by a team of researchers that carried out the study on Literacy Practices in Primary Schools in Uganda: Lessons for Future Interventions, which was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. The research uncovered a lot of issues relevant to the book sector including that:

1. Literacy could be boosted by the availability of locally developed interesting reading materials. One of the concerns was that the current materials to a big extent fall short on relating to children's experiences. The research also found that most of the locally published books for children have poor illustrations and hence less attraction. There were a few exceptions in terms of appealing to the children's experiences such as Gulu Gulu goes to school. Probably writers and literary experts need to study these exceptions so that interesting themes for children's books can be identified.
2.  There was a problem of access to reading materials in those schools where they existed. The study found that schools had developed very prohibitive rules and, kept no records of books and borrowers. The study also found that in some cases the books were locked up in a teacher's house or that the books had been poorly kept. I think that ULIA needs to work on a programme to equip school teachers with library management skills so as to improve the management of book stocks.
3. Children with learning disabilities had no reading materials to cater for their unique needs.
   The workshop noted that the numbers of  supplementary reading materials (SRMs) available in the schools was very limited. It was argued that it was necessary to revise the funding model for SRMs which are currently funded from 10% of the school grants. Head teachers present at the workshop revealed that with the amount of monies available for the purchase of SRMs they were only able to buy about 20 titles in a year.

A book about the research entitled, "Literacy practices in primary schools in Uganda: Lessons for future interventions", published by Fountain Publishers is recommended reading for those of you interested in uncovering all the other findings and recommendations made by the study team.

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