According to Uganda’s revised academic calendar, learners are expected to return to school on July 19 to complete the academic year.

President Museveni on Sunday closed all institutions of learning, less than a month after Senior One and Senior Two learners had reported back to school.

Semi-candidate classes and P.1 to P.3 were slated to return to school on June 7 for their promotional term of the 2020 academic year.

 The new circular by the ministry’s permanent secretary, Alex Kakooza, indicates that they plan to reopen schools for learners who had not completed their 2020 academic year on July 19.

This means that P.1, P.2 and P.3 pupils, who have spent one year and two months at home, are expected to report on July 19 and break off on September 3.

The semi-candidates (P.6, S.3 and S.5) will also report on July 19 and break off on August 3.

S.1 and S.2 students are expected to report on July 19 and break off on August 13 and September 3, respectively.

All the students reporting on July 19 will study for about one-and-a-half months, sit for promotional exams and will start the 2021 academic year on September 20 with P.4 and P.5 learners who had completed their promotional exams before schools were closed.

Kakooza said to ensure equity in the provision of education in the country, no school shall carry out promotions outside the above official timetables on the pretext that some learners attended private lessons and are, therefore, ahead of the rest.

He explained that Senior One and Senior Two learners, who had just reported back to schools before the closure, will complete the remaining part of the term without paying additional schools fees in case they had already completed the interrupted term fees.

Kakooza said semi-candidates, who were expected to report on June 7 for a special term, will report and pay fees proportional to the short term.

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) may conduct a second 2021 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination for candidates with genuine registration challenges.

The Registrar of the board, Is-haq Oloyede, made the disclosure in Lagos while monitoring profiling of candidates with 2021 UTME registration challenges.

Oloyede said so far, there are about 17, 758 candidates with challenges that had been profiled, nationwide.

He said at the end of the entire exercise, the board may have to conduct another examination for those with genuine cases after the main UTME slated for June 19 to July 3.

He reiterated the board’s commitment to ensuring that every Nigerian child desirous of tertiary education would be given an equal opportunity.

He is quoted as saying “Since I came here this morning and interacted with candidates, I have discovered that most of them are largely unserious and are basically the cause of most of their challenges.

Over 500,000 candidates had claimed they were unable to register for the examination within the given time frame – before May 15. JAMB later extended the registration to May 29.

The candidates cited inability to generate a profile code and difficulty in obtaining the National Identification Number (NIN).

JAMB had insisted that no candidate would be allowed to sit for the examination without providing the NIN.

Following the challenges, the board allowed a two-week window for the affected people to lodge their complaints at its offices or registration centres and get help.

Addressing journalists later, the JAMB official called on state ministries of education to regulate activities of tutorial centres as a strategy to save the education sector from collapse.

He said that activities of some tutorial centres remained a hindrance to efforts at sanitising the country’s education system, adding that utorial centres are a haven for examination malpractice

He regretted that some parents were patronising them with delight, while calling on the parents to learn to allow their children and wards go through the normal process of learning so that they can be psychologically mature for tertiary education.

He said “In order to show the nation that the problem of registration is not what a section of the media is painting it to be, we came up with this initiative of asking all candidates with genuine excuses to visit our offices nationwide.”

The registrar said through the process, JAMB discovered that some candidates went as far as using their bank verification numbers in a bid to get their profile codes rather than the NIN.

The Osun government says it has shut more than 600 nursery and primary schools operating without minimum standard requirements in the state.

The Commissioner for Education, Folorunsho Bamisayemi, said this during an inter-ministerial news conference organised by the Ministry of Information and Civic Orientation on Wednesday in Osogbo.

The Commissioner said the closure of the schools was part of the state government’s effort to sanitise the sector.

He added that it was now compulsory for anyone that wanted to establish a school to have a Teacher’s Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN) Certificate, among other requirements.

Also speaking, Olalekan Badmus, the Commissioner for Regional Integration and Special Duties, said the government was feeding more than 30,000 vulnerable persons on a monthly basis under its food support scheme.

Badmus said the state government was spending more than N100 million on the food support scheme every month.