Uganda's STEM surge: the schools betting on labs over libraries

Walk into the sixth-form block of a well-run Ugandan school this term and the pressure on the sciences is visible before anyone speaks. The PCM and PCB combinations, physics-chemistry-maths and physics-chemistry-biology, fill first, the waiting lists run longest there, and the queue at the laboratory door at lunchtime tells you which subjects the pupils themselves take seriously. The intake is climbing. The harder question is which schools are meeting it with substance rather than signage.

Offering a subject is not resourcing it

Almost any school can print Physics and Computer Studies on a prospectus. Far fewer can run them as they are meant to be run. The gap between the two is where families are quietly misled. A science department that exists on paper but teaches from the board, with practicals improvised on the morning of the UNEB exam, produces pupils who can recite a procedure they have never carried out. The schools we rate are the ones that have spent money on the unglamorous machinery of real science teaching.

That machinery is specific and checkable. It is a laboratory with working gas, water and power, not a room of dusty apparatus behind a padlock. It is a technician who is actually on the staff payroll, preparing reagents and setting up apparatus, rather than a teacher doing it in the half-hour before a lesson. And it is a computing room on the timetable as a scheduled, supervised period, not a locked facility opened for the inspector and the brochure photographer.

Three signals that predict where a science pupil thrives

When we visited schools betting on labs over libraries, we stopped asking what they offered and started asking what they could prove. Three signals did most of the work, and none of them appear in a glossy STEM leaflet.

• Practical exam pass rates: the UNEB practical papers in physics, chemistry and biology expose, more honestly than any theory mark, whether pupils have actually handled apparatus across two years.
• Sessions run versus sessions scheduled: the ratio of lab practicals actually carried out to those written on the scheme of work is the single most revealing number a head can show you, and the one most reluctant to surface.
• Specialist staff retention: a school that cannot keep a physics teacher for more than two years cannot build a science culture, because every departure resets the department to zero.

A brochure can promise a laboratory. Only a technician on the payroll and a practical pass rate can prove one. Parents should ask to see both.

Computing is where the bluff is easiest

The science laboratories are expensive to fake, which is part of why they remain a useful filter. Computing is harder. A room of machines photographs well and proves little, since the screens reveal nothing about whether they switch on, whether the network reaches them, or whether the period is ever taught. The schools getting value from their computing rooms treat them as taught time with a teacher who can code, not as a furnished space to be admired. The difference is invisible in a tour and obvious in a timetable.

There is also the matter of what happens when the power or the network fails, which in much of the country it will. The serious schools have a plan for that morning rather than a cancelled lesson, whether a generator, a fallback exercise, or a teacher confident enough to teach the concept without the screen. A computing programme that collapses every time the grid does was never really a programme.

What this means for a science-minded child

For a parent steering a science-minded child, the practical instruction is to resist the brochure and interrogate the substance. Ask to walk into the laboratory unannounced and see whether it is in use. Ask for the practical pass rates, not the aggregate division counts. Ask how long the current physics and chemistry teachers have been in post. A school that has genuinely bet on labs over libraries will welcome the questions; a school that has bet on marketing will steer you back to the photographs.

The encouraging part of the story is that the bet is spreading. The growing band of schools resourcing science seriously is not confined to the wealthiest names or the capital. What they share is not budget alone but a decision that the sciences are a core promise to be kept rather than a fashionable line to be advertised. For the pupils sitting in those laboratories, timetabled and supervised and supplied, the surge is not a trend. It is the education they were sold.