External supervision and school performance in government secondary schools in Central Uganda

Abstract

This study was on External supervision and School Performance in Government Secondary schools in Central Uganda. It was conceptualized from the perspective of establishing the adequacy of External supervision. It also sought to examine the relationship between external supervision and students‟ and staff discipline, syllabus completion, use of teaching methods, availability of infrastructure, and academic performance. It was based on the communication theory as originated by Shanon and Weaver. It was a descriptive cross sectional survey using qualitative and quantitative paradigms following six objectives each of which had a research hypothesis. Questionnaires were administered to the systematically sampled school head teachers, District Education Officers and District Inspectors of Schools. Interviews were also administered to the officials in the Ministry of Education and Sports and the Directorate of Education Standards. The researcher also used documentary review guide. The researcher categorized data according to the objectives and research hypotheses, changed them into frequency counts, analyzed data basing on content analysis using the Pearson correlation for testing the relationship. The steps of analysis were done for all the research hypotheses using the tests of goodness-of-fit and percentage distribution technique at the level of significance of 95% (or a= 0.05).The study established that external supervision is not adequate because it lacks the postmodern approaches to supervision and the inadequate resources allocated to it and there was generally no relationship between external supervision and school performance. It was concluded that if external supervision was adequate, performance in government secondary schools would be satisfactory. The researcher recommended that External supervision should apply postmodern techniques, be adequately funded by allocating enough funds to and equipping external supervisors with the necessary skills, enough pre-training and in-service training in supervision.