Sr Sabina Tumusiime and the discipline of a great girls' school

Sr Sabina Tumusiime leads Immaculate Heart Girls' School, the long-established girls' secondary in the south-west whose name has, for a generation, been a byword for high expectations far from Kampala.

Her inheritance is a formidable one, and she is plain that the job is to run it on systems rather than on any one person's force of will. Attendance is tracked, weaker pupils are followed up without fuss, and the assumption that geography should lower ambition is simply not entertained.

She talks about discipline the way good heads do, not as punishment but as the scaffolding that lets girls take academic risks safely. The sciences in particular are pushed hard, and the alumnae who return to teach are treated as proof that the model works.

It is demanding, and she does not pretend otherwise. But the results, and the steady stream of families who choose the school over options closer to home, suggest the bargain still holds.