The teacher gap: why Uganda’s private schools are paying 40% more than the government scale

When the Ministry of Education and Sports framework and the Ministry of Public Service’s 2025 teacher pay scales were published, the headline was modest: a 6% adjustment across the U1, U2 and U3 grades, broadly tracking inflation. The story below the headline is harder, and it is reshaping who teaches where.

A 40% gap, once you count the allowances

Across Praecip’s sample of forty Kampala-region private secondary schools, the average effective monthly compensation for a fully-qualified A-Level subject teacher now sits roughly 40% above the comparable government band, once housing, transport and exam-marking allowances are included. The base salaries are closer than that figure suggests; it is the allowances and the in-kind benefits that open the gap.

That distinction matters because allowances are exactly the lever a school controls without waiting for a national pay review. A private school cannot rewrite the government scale, but it can add staff housing, a transport stipend and a termly bonus, and in doing so manufacture a 40% premium out of a base that is only modestly higher.

The gap is not theoretical

We spoke to twelve heads of department who, between them, lost twenty-seven experienced teachers to private competitors over the last three exam cycles. The departing teachers were not the weakest, and the schools they left were not poorly led. They left for predictable cash, a termly bonus, and, in several cases, on-site staff housing that ended a two-hour commute.

I did not lose my markers to a better school. I lost them to a shorter commute and a bonus they could count on. I could not match either.

The pattern is the most damaging kind of attrition, because it strips out precisely the experienced UCE and UACE markers whose judgement a department relies on. A school can replace a body in front of a class; it cannot quickly replace fifteen years of knowing how the national examiner thinks.

The levers that actually slow it

The trajectory, if the private band keeps outpacing government adjustment, points to the schools serving Uganda’s broadest base of pupils steadily losing the staff that long-run results depend on. But the data also points to the levers that slow the bleed, and most of them are not a matter of matching salary pound for pound.

• Allowances over base: housing and transport support close the effective gap faster than a base-pay rise the school cannot afford.
• Retention bonuses: a bonus tied to staying through a full exam cycle directly counters the predictable-cash pull of private offers.
• Transfer and posting policy: keeping experienced markers near their homes removes the commute that the data shows is a leading reason teachers move.

Why this is a sector problem, not a school one

The uncomfortable conclusion is that a widening salary delta does not just move teachers between employers; it sorts the most experienced staff toward the schools that already serve the most advantaged pupils. Left unaddressed, the gap compounds the very inequality the system is meant to narrow. Closing it does not require matching private cash. It requires the schools losing staff to compete on the things, allowances, predictability and proximity, that the leavers themselves say actually moved them.