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, stood for high expectations far from Kampala. Hers is the demanding job of carrying that inheritance forward, and she is plain about what it requires: not the force of a single personality, but systems robust enough to outlast any one of them.

An inheritance to be run, not relived

The reputation she inherited is formidable, and the temptation with such an inheritance is to preserve it as a relic, to coast on a name built by predecessors. Sr Sabina rejects that. The job, as she frames it, is to run the school on systems rather than on anyone’s force of will, including her own. A school that depends on one charismatic head is fragile by design; a school that runs on dependable processes can survive the departure of any individual, herself included.

In practice that means attendance is tracked rather than assumed, weaker pupils are followed up without fuss or fanfare, and the assumption that geography should lower ambition is simply not entertained. A girl in the south-west is held to the same expectations she would meet in the capital, and the systems are built to make sure that holds true even on the days when no one is watching.

Discipline as scaffolding

She talks about discipline the way the best heads do, not as punishment but as scaffolding: the structure that lets girls take academic risks safely. A pupil who knows the boundaries, who trusts that the system around her is firm and fair, is freer to attempt the harder subject and to fail at it without disaster. Discipline, in this account, is not the opposite of ambition but its precondition.

Discipline is not there to make girls obedient. It is there to make them brave, to give them the firm ground from which they can reach for something difficult.

Pushing the sciences hard

The sciences in particular are pushed hard, in conscious resistance to the long-standing drift that steers girls towards softer options. The pillars of her stewardship are concrete and consistent:

• Systems over personality: the school is run on dependable processes designed to outlast any single leader.
• Tracked attendance and follow-up: weaker pupils are chased quietly and consistently rather than left to drift.
• Geography rejected as excuse: distance from Kampala is never allowed to justify lower expectations.
• Science ambition: physics, chemistry and mathematics are pushed hard, and returning alumnae who teach them prove the model works.

A demanding bargain that holds

The alumnae who return to teach are treated, rightly, as proof of concept: girls the school formed, who chose to come back and form the next cohort in turn. They are the clearest evidence that the model reproduces rather than merely persists, and that the expectations Sr Sabina upholds are ones former pupils came to value rather than merely endure.

It is demanding, and she does not pretend otherwise. A school run to this standard asks a great deal of its pupils and its staff alike. But the results, and the steady stream of families who choose Immaculate Heart over options far closer to home, suggest the bargain still holds. For parents in the south-west and beyond, the lesson is that a great girls’ school is sustained not by reputation but by the daily discipline of running it well.