3. CONTEXT
The English Block project must be considered in its context. It was devised in 1965 in Uganda. This was during a period of transition between the British colonial system and complete independence. It was a time when, although political independence had been achieved, British civil servants were still found in government offices, when there were many British teachers in the secondary schools and when the syllabuses in use in the schools were still based on the British model. Although an East African Examinations Board had been set up, the forms of the papers were still based on those created by the Cambridge Overseas Examinations Board, which ran the examinations of most British colonies in the immediate pre-independence period. It was also a period of rapid increase in the numbers of schools and pupils as the new governments tried to increase the numbers of educated people, both because they were needed to replace the British and because ordinary people regarded availability of education as the main fruit of independence. However there were few locally trained secondary teachers.

This period of expansion required the recruitment by the Ministry of Overseas Development (which might be thought of as the Colonial Office with a new name and, perhaps, purpose) of large numbers of British teachers.
Few local citizens had been trained as teachers at secondary level at this time. A large training programme for local teachers had however begun. Many of the existing primary teachers were going through secondary conversion courses. Graduates were still few in number but the universities also were being rapidly expanded. The imported British teachers were thus a temporary resource to fill the gap caused by the rapid expansion of the schools and the lack of local teachers to staff the new schools demanded by the needs of independence. Many of them were recruited as new graduates and put through a teacher training course at Makerere University College (as it was then, before it became Makerere University) the oldest constituent of the University of East Africa.

East African Schools
The schools which were now being rapidly expanded were those set up in colonial times by the missions and the government. The model for these schools was the British Public School (private school, that is). They nearly all provided boarding facilities, necessary in the early days to cater for rural pupils when only a tiny proportion even of primary leavers passed on to secondary school. Prefects, Houses and staff attitudes were often an imitation of the systems used in the elite British schools. This is not surprising as an important part of the purpose of the British elite schools had been to train administrators for the colonies, and the British civil servants naturally used the model they knew.