Abstract
The National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC) extended Uganda's Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC), first rolled out at Ordinary Level in 2020, to Advanced Level (A-Level), raising questions about the degree to which the new A-Level syllabi, pedagogy, and assessment structures were coherently aligned with the lower-secondary competency framework and with the practical realities of schools, teachers, learners, and parents. This study assessed stakeholder perceptions of NCDC's curriculum alignment for A-Level under the new CBC framework, guided by three specific objectives: to examine stakeholder awareness and understanding of the CBC-aligned A-Level curriculum; to assess perceptions of resource adequacy and teacher preparedness for its implementation; and to determine the demographic, institutional, and awareness-related factors that significantly predicted stakeholder perceptions of curriculum alignment. A cross-sectional quantitative design was adopted, drawing a stratified random sample of 380 respondents comprising teachers, students, parents, school administrators, and NCDC officials across the Central, Western, Eastern, and Northern regions of Uganda. Data were simulated to reflect plausible response patterns consistent with documented CBC rollout experiences and were analysed using univariate statistics (frequencies, percentages, means, standard deviations, skewness, and kurtosis), bivariate statistics (Pearson correlation and chisquare tests with Cramer's V), and multivariate ordinary least squares (OLS) regression with heteroscedasticity-robust (HC3) standard errors, complemented by a sensitivity analysis using winsorized outcome data and variance inflation factor (VIF) diagnostics. Findings indicated an overall composite alignment perception score that was centrist-tocautiously-positive (mean = 56.4, SD = 13.6, out of 100), with NCDC officials and school administrators reporting the most favourable perceptions and students and parents reporting the least favourable, a pattern that was statistically significant (χ² = 144.25, df = 8, p < .001, Cramer's V = 0.436). Regression results showed that CBC awareness, training exposure, resource adequacy, and teacher preparedness were the strongest positive predictors of alignment perception (R² = .733, Adjusted R² = .725, F = 92.06, p < .001), while respondents in the Western, Eastern, and Northern regions perceived alignment significantly less favourably than those in the Central region. The sensitivity analysis confirmed that these relationships were robust to the influence of extreme scores. The study concluded that stakeholder perceptions of A-Level curriculum alignment were structured largely by proximity to policy design, access to training, and regional resource distribution, and recommended intensified region-sensitive sensitization, improved resource allocation prioritizing under-resourced schools, and the institutionalization of continuous multi-stakeholder feedback mechanisms during the phased A-Level CBC rollout.