In 1993, 113 pupils out of 341 who sat for their Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE) scored an aggregate of four at Buganda Road Primary School.
For at least 30 years, that remained the best performance, in terms of aggregate fours, by any primary school in the country. The school was managed by Joseph Almeida, a no-nonsense administrator who died in June 2017.
Then Hillside Nursery and Primary School came along. In 2023, the school had 131 pupils score aggregate score of four. The difference was that more than 600 pupils sat the exams.
What was even more remarkable about the 2023 performance was that in 2022, the school had registered 99 of its pupils with aggregate four; therefore, not many people thought the feat could be equalled or even bettered.
Hillside’s stellar performance led to an influx of pupils from other schools as parents rushed to enrol their children in what appeared to be a school with a magic touch. The school became the leading contributor to the early morning traffic jam on the Namugongo-Naalya Road.
Then things took a bad turn. In 2024, the school did not register a single aggregate four. This sent shockwaves through the parents and teachers of the school.
In several meetings, teachers and parents claimed that the Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB), the body that sets and marks national exams, had been harsh on Hillside pupils because of their previous good performance, and that they had been graded differently from pupils in other schools. UNEB denied the accusations.
Some panicky parents with children in the lower classes, P4 and P5, decided to transfer them elsewhere, but the school management assured them that “normal service” would resume in 2025.
That was not the case. Last year, the school again failed to produce a single aggregate four among its 595 candidates.
Sources told Bbeg Media that the school plans to hold a meeting with parents of P7 pupils in the second week of the first term to try to address the matter. The school anticipates that the meeting will be acrimonious.
However, a senior teacher at the school told Bbeg Media that some “big people” in government were fighting the school, which is why its performance had been affected.
Asked who these “big people” were, the teacher declined to name them, saying: “You know them.”
This year, for the first time in a long while, the school registered a significant number of pupils in division two, with 143 out of 595 candidates. It also had two pupils in division three.
