The third term of the school holiday for the year 2022 will begin tomorrow (24), Education Minister Susil Premajayantha said.

He said this while addressing a national ceremony of distribution of free textbooks and uniforms to schoolchildren held at the Colombo Sanghamitta Girls’ College this morning.

"This year we did not give more days for the school vacation as the children were unable to come to school more than 60 percent of the time in both 2020 and 2021," he said.

Therefore, the Ministry has decided to keep as much school time as possible and has decided to commence the school year's first term on Monday (27).

The minister mentioned that the cut-off marks for the 2022 grade five school examination had been released and that most of the schools had made arrangements for the grade one enrollments on Tuesday (28) after considering the appeals.

"The new school year should normally start in January. But we are going ahead with the schedule that was delayed due to COVID-19 as much as possible. We held the examinations on time, as scheduled. We are now in the final stage of the evaluation of the 2022 GCE Advanced Level (A/L) examination scripts, and it is the responsibility of the university lecturers, professors, and teachers to release the results," Minister Premajayantha said. (Chaturanga Pradeep Samarawickrama)