School Management Committee Monitoring Skills and Performance of Government Aided Muslim Founded Primary Schools in Uganda: A Case of Bugisu Muslim District Council

Abstract

The performance of Muslim Founded educational institutions has picked a lot of interest globally over the years. The Uganda Muslim Supreme Council established structures at different levels of administration to participate in the monitoring of Muslim-founded Schools. This study premised on Osborne and Gaebler's (1992) constructs of monitoring, aimed at investigating how monitoring skills of the foundation body representatives on the School Management Committees contribute to the performance of Government Aided Muslim Founded Primary Schools in Uganda, taking a case of the BMDC. A descriptive cross-sectional survey design was adopted for this study, with quantitative and qualitative data approaches, while multivariable linear regression was used to obtain the magnitude of the contribution of SMC monitoring skills to the performance of the primary schools under BMDC. The study revealed that monitoring skills have a positive correlation with the performance of the Government Aided Muslim Founded Primary Schools, though, the correlation is moderate. The moderate correlation is caused by insufficient monitoring skills exhibited by the foundation body representatives in areas such as the development of performance indicators, collection of relevant data during monitoring, designing of monitoring tools, and usage of appropriate methods during monitoring. The study, therefore, concluded that such insufficient monitoring skills have hindered them to adequately monitor which has partly affected the performance of the schools. It is as such recommended that BMDC needs to incorporate specific non-financial empowerment capacity-building components into school activities tailored to train the members on the SMC in aspects of monitoring and evaluation, adult literacy, and financial literacy for improved skills, knowledge, and leadership.