Key messages
- Enforce Uganda’s 2016 ban on corporal punishment through regular school inspections and clear accountability for head teachers.
- Corporal punishment lowers proficiency by 6.7 percentage points in English and 7.7 points in Mathematics, with the largest losses among girls and in Mathematics.
- Address the social norms that keep corporal punishment in use: many communities still see it as an effective way to discipline children, and legal bans alone will not change behaviour unless that belief shifts too.
- Scale up community-based anti-violence campaigns, which have already been shown to reduce the use of corporal punishment in schools.
- Build gender-responsive support into school programmes, since girls experience disproportionately larger learning losses from corporal punishment than boys.
Key messages as published in the author’s policy brief.