Bro Martin Wanambwa and the long game at St Henry's Kitovu

Bro Martin Wanambwa has spent long enough at St Henry’s College Kitovu, the Masaka boys’ school everyone simply calls SHACK, to take the long view of almost everything. He has watched cohorts arrive nervous and leave confident, watched fashions in education come and go, and watched the league tables rise and fall around an institution that, in his telling, is the only thing that really matters. Cohorts come and go; the school is the point.

The unhurried steward

His stewardship is of the deliberately unhurried kind. Traditions are kept not out of sentiment but because they still do real work, the house system that teaches responsibility, the prep that teaches self-discipline, the rituals that bind one cohort to the next. When he judges a tradition has stopped earning its keep, it goes; when it still does, it stays, regardless of whether it looks old-fashioned to a visiting parent.

Change, when it comes, comes quietly and only after it has been tested. A new teaching method or pastoral system is tried on a single class first, observed, and adopted across the school only if it proves itself. This is the opposite of the sweeping reform that newly appointed heads are often tempted into, and it is precisely why so little at SHACK has to be undone.

Character before grades

Ask Bro Martin about results and he redirects, almost reflexively, to character. The discipline of prep. The responsibility that comes from running a house. The older boy who learns, by being made responsible for one, to look after a younger one. The grades, in his account, are not the goal but the by-product. Build the boy properly and the marks follow; chase the marks directly and you build neither.

I am not raising examination candidates. I am raising men, and the examinations are simply one of the things men have to do well along the way.

The long-game method

The principles that hold his approach together are few and consistent:

• Institution over cohort: individual years pass, so decisions are made for the long-run health of the school, not the next exam season.
• Tradition that works: customs are kept because they still do real work, and dropped, without drama, when they do not.
• Tested change: new methods are tried on one class first and scaled only once they have proven themselves.
• Character first: discipline, responsibility and care for others are the goal, and the grades are treated as their by-product.

Judged on a decade, not a season

It is an old argument, and an unfashionable one in a league-table age that rewards visible, immediate movement. A head who declines to chase the annual UNEB headlines is easy to caricature as complacent. Bro Martin accepts the caricature and ignores it. The only timescale on which he is willing to be judged is the decade after a boy leaves, when the question is not what division he scored but what kind of man he became.

By that measure, the boys who pass through SHACK tend to prove him right. They turn up, years later, as the steady, responsible, capable adults the method was designed to produce. For a parent choosing between a school that promises a fast climb up the table and one that promises a man at the end of it, Bro Martin’s answer has never changed. A great boys’ school, he insists, is built in decades, not exam seasons.