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According to the Education for All Global monitoring Report(2005)
Although the right to education has been reaffirmed on many occasions since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed in 1948, many international instruments are silent about the qualitative dimension of learning. Most recently, the United Nations’ Millennium Declaration, adopted in 2000, states that all children will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling by 2015 but makes no specific reference to its quality. Achieving universal participation, however, depends fundamentally upon the quality of education available.
How well pupils are taught and how much they learn have a crucial impact on frequency and duration of school attendance.
Parents make judgments about school quality when investing in their children’s education. People in all countries expect schooling to help children develop creatively and emotionally and acquire the skills, values and attitudes necessary for them to lead productive lives and become responsible citizens.
The World Declaration on Education for All (1990) and the Dakar Framework for Action (2000) – the two most recent United Nations conference declarations focusing on education – recognize quality as a prime condition for achieving Education for All. The Dakar Framework affirms that quality is ‘at the heart of education’. Goal 2 commits nations to providing primary education ‘of good quality’.

Education for all cannot be achieved without improving quality. In many parts of the world, an enormous gap persists between the numbers of students graduating from school and those among them who master a minimum set of cognitive skills. Any policy aimed at pushing net enrolments towards 100% must also assure decent learning conditions and opportunities.

In the many countries that are striving to guarantee all children the right to education, the focus on access often overshadows attention to quality. Yet quality determines how much and how well children learn and the extent to which their education translates into a range of personal, social and developmental benefits.
Goal 6 of the Dakar Framework for Action emphasizes the need to improve all aspects of the quality of education. Yet, as this report highlights, too many pupils are leaving school without mastering a minimum set of cognitive and non-cognitive.
Uganda is no exception to the general rule as Completion of primary schooling remains a major concern: delayed enrolment is widespread; retention rates are low for both boys and girls but worse for the girls and the argument today is that unless there is an improvement in the quality of instruction that the children receive at school, then we are not progressing towards an educated society and sustainable development.

Education in Uganda still faces a number of challenges which compromises its quality like inadequate infra-structure classroom facilities, no latrines, excessive large numbers of students, teacher absenteeism insufficient instructional materials, inadequate school facilities and poor teacher performance and high dropout rates.
Even worse is the content of the curriculum that is too theoretical and in many cases fails to meet the needs of the ordinary Ugandan.
The choice to be educated is harder for the ordinary Ugandan in the North struggling to make ends meet as well as fit in a normal life schedule. For him it is a question of ‘proper time use and opportunity cost’. Going to school to learn knitting/sewing on the side is not such a bad idea after all one can make a little money instead of helping out in the gardens or even getting married.
With the education of today you can hardly convince a parent of a primary 5 child to keep him/her in school yet he can dig or make bricks or even get married and bring cows home.
It’s even harder to convince the children especially where they have to study a whole day without a meal. Clearly something is fundamentally wrong, may be we should be looking at addressing the needs of the people through good quality education.