Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB) has Friday released 2017 Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE) results, reporting an improvement in performance compared to the previous year, 2016.
Results which were officially released by Education Minister, Janet Museveni indicate that boys performed better than girls, with Social Studies (SST) being the best performed subject.
A total of 646,080 candidates were registered to sit PLE at 12,751 centres across the country out of whom almost three-quarters of the candidates were from Universal Primary Education (UPE) schools.
UNEB says 32,120 boys passed in Division One compared to 25,078 girls representing 5.1% and 4% respectively. Girls (5.4%) also registered more failures than boys (3.8%).
More girls (51%) sat for PLE compared to 312,695 boys.
UNEB’s Executive Secretary, Daniel Odongo reported a general improvement in performance compared to the previous year, 2016. Pupils’ works showed better writing and expression skills.
“We wish to observe that performance in 2017 is better than that of 2016 except at division 1 level, In 2016 we had 50.7% while in 2017 we got 55.9%, in division 4 the performance increased from 87.0% to 91.0%”, Odondo noted.
According to the results, 57,198 pupils passed in first division, 293,977 in second division, 128,573 in third while 91,504 passed in forth division. Total failures were 57,354.
However, there was a slight decline in subjects like Mathematics and English, as well as in numbers of pupils that attained Division 1. Failures also droped from 13% to 9.1%.
The Education Minister applauded the effort of parents in educating girls, saying that for the third year in a row, the number of girls sitting PLE exams has been higher than that of boys.
Districts that registered the most failure rates include Kween, Bukwo, Tororo, Kayunga, Mbale, Mayuge, Kamuli, Buvuma,Budaka and Bududa.