Interventions to Ensure Children are Safe in and Around School Initiated in West Nile and Eastern Uganda
In January, the Strengthening Education Systems for Improved Learning (SESIL) programme trained 579 primary school headteachers, senior women and senior men teachers (SWT/SMT), and school management committee chairpersons from 116 Ugandan primary schools across four pilot districts. The training focused on safeguarding practices to tackle violence against children, especially girls, that fosters gender inequalities in schools.
The local governments included Moyo district and Arua Municipality in West Nile region, and Kween district and Kapchorwa Municipality in eastern Uganda. The overall objective of the training was to build and strengthen the capacity of the headteachers, senior teachers and the school management committees to effectively prevent, record and respond to Violence Against Children in Schools (VACiS).
In preparation for the training workshops, a training of trainers (ToT) workshop was conducted in Arua for 17 facilitators and in Mbale for 15 facilitators targeting selected district and municipal officials including the education officers, community development officers, probation and welfare officers, gender officers, inspectors of schools and the district/municipal SESIL focal persons.
Officials from the Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) departments of Teacher Instructor Education and Training [TIET], Basic Education, the Gender Unit and Special Needs Education participated in the training. Along with representatives of Ministries of Local Government and Public Service and principals from the Primary Teachers Colleges (PTCs) in target areas.
At the end of the workshops, the headteachers, senior teachers and School Management Committee chairpersons developed their district/school-specific action plans, given the varied contexts, to roll out the Children are safe in and around school priority. They were also taken through the different forms/types of violence in schools to inform and build their competence in the collection and use of the data as part of the SESIL Managing for Results (M4R) approach.
Follow up action
In February and March 2020, the SESIL team conducted monitoring and field support visits to all the VACiS pilot districts and schools. This also included one-day reflection meetings for the senior woman and senior man teachers to discuss progress, areas of improvement and reinforce the use of data collection tools.
In eastern Uganda, it was found that 97% of schools in Kapchorwa Municipality and Kween district were already conducting anonymous data collection, though there were variations in quality and following steps as per the toolkit. The SWT/SMT were encouraged to follow toolkit guidelines.
Children from different schools were able to explain the anonymous data collection and why they need to report. For example, a pupil from Cheborom Primary School in Kween district was able to describe the process of anonymous reporting and she emphasized on how the process gives them privacy to report cases of abuse without their identities exposed. And they feel confident to report any form of abuse whether sexual and physical through the anonymous reporting process
In West Nile, it was noted that there was increased district support to schools in response and attention to child safeguarding. There was also enhanced capacity of the all headteachers and senior teachers on VACiS awareness-raising and data collection.
However, for most schools across both regions, there is significant room for improvement in aspects of confidentiality, proper use of the case registers for direct reporting, and anonymity in data collection. Some senior teachers did not follow all the steps and principles of anonymous data collection.
These principles include; the pupils selected randomly from each class i.e. P1 to P7, the pupils disaggregated by sex (boys on their own and girls on their own), the reporting has to be anonymous (no names, age, sex), confidentiality has to be ensured at all times to protect the identity of survivors, the exercise has to be inclusive (children with disability and refugee children have to be involved) and the local language of instruction has to be used for P1 to P3/4 pupils. Some just gave pieces of papers to pupils and told them to tick and then take them to the staff room.
On the other hand, some schools still lagged in kick-starting VACiS interventions while some used incorrect versions of the data collection tool.
The SESIL team and the local government officials were able to support the schools in addressing these challenges/ gaps during the school visits and one-day reflection meetings with stakeholders from the pilot schools. The participants reflected on their work, shared experiences and best practices for learning and developed actions to address these issues. More follow up actions will be undertaken in the coming months. The VACiS pilot activities in the 116 schools are planned to be evaluated in August 2020. Change stories, best practices and lessons learnt will be documented during the exercise.
