Background: Uganda has achieved remarkable expansion in educational access through Universal Primary Education, with primary enrollment increasing from 2.5 million in 1996 to over 10 million by 2020, yet this quantitative success masks a profound qualitative failure characterized by severe learning poverty affecting approximately 82% of learners who cannot read and comprehend simple texts by age 10. While multiple factors contribute to poor learning outcomes—including resource constraints, teacher capacity limitations, and socioeconomic disadvantages—the potential of school leadership as a lever for improvement has remained inadequately explored in policy and practice. Objective: This study aimed to critically analyze the nature and drivers of the learning crisis in Ugandan primary schools and examine the potential of leadership-focused interventions to improve learning outcomes through three specific objectives: (1) assessing current learning outcomes and identifying key contributing factors; (2) examining relationships between school leadership practices and student achievement; and (3) exploring evidence-based leadership development models applicable to resource-constrained contexts. Methods: The study employed a mixed-methods convergent parallel design involving 384 primary schools selected through multistage stratified random sampling from 12 districts across Uganda's four regions, with sample size calculated to achieve 80% statistical power. Quantitative data were collected from 23,040 learners assessed using standardized Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) and Results: Descriptive analyses confirmed a severe learning crisis with mean literacy scores of 34.2% (SD=18.7) for Primary Three and 42.6% (SD=21.3) for Primary Six, and numeracy scores of 29.8% (SD=16.9) and 37.4% (SD=19.8) respectively, though substantial between-school variation (ranges exceeding 85 percentage points) indicated achievability of quality learning within existing constraints. Contributing factors included excessive pupil-teacher ratios (M=58.4, SD=22.6), inadequate instructional materials (M=38.7% availability, SD=24.8), poor infrastructure (M=4.6 on 10-point scale, SD=2.3), and socioeconomic disadvantages. Leadership practice scores were moderate to low across dimensions, with instructional leadership (M=2.9, SD=0.8), teacher professional development support (M=2.6, SD=0.9), and data-driven decision-making (M=2.4, SD=0.9) scoring particularly low on 5-point scales. Hierarchical regression analysis demonstrated that leadership practices collectively explained 15.5% of unique variance in Primary Six literacy outcomes (ΔR²=0.155, p