School Environment and Curriculum Management in Private Secondary Schools in Busiro County, Wakiso District Uganda

ABSTRACT The purpose of the study was to assess the influence of school environment on the curriculum management in private secondary schools in Busiro County, Wakiso District. To achieve this, specific study objectives were adopted. They included i) to assess the quality of school environment of selected private secondary schools in the county; ii) to examine the success of curriculum management in such private secondary schools, and iii) to determine the relationship between quality of school environment and the extent of curriculum management success in the same schools in the county. Literature review exposed several research gaps in previous literature related to the objectives above, namely conceptual, contextual, temporal, scope and approach gaps, among others. To fill these gaps, the study adopted a descriptive correlational research design based on the quantitative and qualitative approach for data collection and analysis. Data was collected using a quantitative method of the questionnaire survey and the qualitative technique of oral interviews. For quantitative data, computer programmes namely, the Statistical Package for Social Scientists (SPSS) and Microsoft excel were sought for data analysis using frequency distribution, arithmetic mean, Pearson’s correlations and standard multiple regression. Qualitative data including mainly interview responses were analysed using the interpretive technique. The findings of the study were that among private secondary schools of study, school classrooms, library, and science laboratory facilities received more attention than the computer workshop environment. However, despite this advantage, all the facilities were in some respects less conducive for curriculum implementation mainly centred on student class academic activities, On average, school physical facilities and learning materials were of good quality only in 25% of the schools investigated. In 40% of these schools, such learning services were fairly good while in the rest of the schools they were poor for student academic activities. Besides, teacher management was good only in less than 50% of such schools. The study also found out varying situations with regard to teacher and student performance in class as the heart of curriculum management in a school system. While teachers and students performed well in some private secondary schools, in many similar schools of study in the county performances of such primary stakeholders were largely average. There were also a few of such schools in which results show that teachers and students performed poorly in class activities respectively. Generally, the findings indicated that the quality of school learning facilities in private secondary schools in the county posed a significant effect on student learning particularly the classroom, library and science laboratory. Teacher management in almost 50% of the private secondary schools of field survey was not positively enabling enough for successful student learning. The conclusion reached was that the more the school environment was good enough, the more curriculum management particularly student class academic learning would be successful and vice versa. As result, it was recommended that education development agencies and school managers associated with private secondary schools in the county should ensure to improve on the quality of classroom, school library, science laboratory and computer laboratory services for successful curriculum management.