Does Detective Financial Control Influence Enrolment as a Performance Indicator of Private Investment in Secondary Education. Ugandan Internal Stakeholders’ Qualitative Perspective

Abstract

Uganda’s national secondary school enrolment has been consistently increasing over the past three decades, but this increase is typified by failure of most of the established private schools to realise their enrolment sizes as planned. Research has attributed this failure to different factors, including culture and poverty that prevents many primary school leavers from joining secondary school, stiff competition among secondary schools, and unsatisfactory academic service quality that constrains the marketing of some schools. The question is answered based on a qualitative case study that involved 12 internal stakeholders who included members of the Board of Governors, Board of Directors, head teachers, school bursars and accountants purposively selected from a group of three secondary schools in central Uganda. Results revealed that the way detective financial control was conducted in the selected schools influenced the extent to which the schools realised their planned enrolment. The management of the selected schools and all those in Uganda in general could benefit from dealing with formal suppliers instead of dealing with the informal ones who tend to keep incomplete or no records of their transactions with the schools.

Keywords: detective financial control, financial verification, financial feedback, remedial actions