Education for all: Mind remoteness

On May 16, a few experts from the education sector gathered at the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) in Colombo for a roundtable discussion on ‘inequalities’ of the proposed National Education Policy Framework (NEPF) of Sri Lanka, organised jointly with the University of Nottingham. 
The discussion was confined mainly to early, primary and secondary public education, although the NEPF covers all sub-sectors, including tertiary education and private and pirivena education. 
This article is based on some of the thematic issues highlighted during the discussion.

The demand pressure for the leading schools in Sri Lanka has been constantly rising over the years and decades. Accordingly, the issue has also aggravated the transport congestion in the main cities and other problems affecting children’s childhood and well-being as well as parents’ daily affairs. 

It has opened numerous doors for normalisation of corruption, falsified documentation and other misconducts related to school admissions in the country. The authorities have also been under pressure to attend individual matters and grievances related to school admissions, rather than to focus on policy matters. 

Equity and free education

Sri Lanka has cherished and expanded its so-called ‘free education’ system since 1944, with the objective of providing every child ‘equitable access’ to formal education. 

Free education is a misinterpreted term by the standard meaning of the term because ‘education is not cost-free’. In the local context, it means that formal education is available at ‘free of charge’ to a child throughout his or her academic path from primary to higher education levels.

Although the promise of the free education system is to ensure its equitable access to all, growing inequity in access to quality educational opportunities in the country has been emerging as an issue of great concern. It has even led to widespread social, economic and political discontents in the country. These discontents have challenged the perceived equity principle of the free education system. 

It may be true that in Sri Lanka, every child can find a school within walking distance to his or her home, thanks to the spread of public schools throughout the island. Nevertheless, on the contrary, there is a common knowledge that a child should be in one of the ‘leading schools’ located in urbanised environments, in order to ensure a successful academic path. 

National and provincial division

The inequality problem has aggravated by the introduction of national and provincial schools under the 13th Amendment of the constitution; in general, the provincial schools are considered to be inferior to the national schools, in terms of infrastructure, facilities, staff, locational advantage and of course, performance. 
Out of 10,146 schools in the country, the government has retained 396 as national schools, as data from the Education Ministry (2021), leaving others to be managed by the Provincial Councils. As per the data from the Education Ministry (2021), student enrolment in 2971 schools (29 percent) is less than 100 students, while in 1419 schools (14 percent) within this category, there are less than 50 students.

The academic path of a student consists of ‘cut-off points’, resulting in a selection of a smaller portion of students to provide with ‘better’ educational opportunities by denying its equal access to the others. It essentially raises the question whether the ‘dropouts’ are not important or whether each child is good in different things but not the same thing. 

These cut-off points along one’s academic path are the Year 5 Scholarship exam, GCE (Ordinary Level) exam and GCE (Advance Level) exam, while the impact of the first and last exams on the future of a student are detrimental. 

Guiding principles

The Report of the Sectoral Oversight Committee on Education on National Education Policy Framework – Sri Lanka (2023-2033), issued on May 9, 2024, recommends four guiding principles of education reforms. Among these principles, the first specifies free education as the foundational principle and the second education as a fundamental right. While the equity dimension of education emerges from these two principles too, the third is exclusively centred on the equity issue of free education. It specifies that equity and social justice to be the overarching norm and standard for education sector reforms. 

The last principle is about the fulfilment of basic needs of a child as a prerequisite, in order to make education effective. Technically, this principle too entails an emphasis on the equity dimension. The lack of minimum pre-conditions such as food, uniforms and books could restrict access to education by some of the students from less-affluent families.

In spite of the fact that formal education is free in Sri Lanka, about 80 years of experience with free education suggests that there is a wide variation in its equitable delivery. It has favoured the children admitted to leading schools against those in lagging schools and accrued more benefits to the children of the affluent families against those of poor families.

Locational advantage

Studies have also revealed that access to free education has been different among children, due to spatial differences of both the people and schools. Secondly, there are policy-driven differences among the schools in terms of quality of education, so that it has not been possible to ensure that each child in each school is receiving the same levels of education. 

Thirdly, due to differences in both access to education and quality of education, the educational outcome is different among different children at the point they leave the formal academic path. 

Although the concept of free education has an underlying promise for promoting equity in education for all, location matters. As studies have confirmed, urban-rural disparities operate against rural children and rural schools, favouring the urban sector. 

Although many have been promoting a romantic attitude towards rural life, comparatively the evidence suggests that the rural sector in Sri Lanka is disproportionately over-populated and most of the poor in Sri Lanka have also concentrated in the rural sector. 

Historically, the people of a growing population of Sri Lanka have spread thinly over the land, stretching further into remote areas by encroaching wildlife and eroding environmental sustainability. Accordingly, rurality is a decisive factor that determines not only the sub-standard educational attainments but also the overall developmental outcome. 

While all such conditions of development may not be either feasible or desirable through policies, programmes and projects, mere focus on rural education sector alone is a complex policy issue to be addressed from a different perspective.

(Prof. Sirimal Abeyratne [BA Hons. (Colombo), MA and MPhil (IISS - The Hague), PhD (VU - Amsterdam)] is Emeritus Professor in Economics, University of Colombo and Chairman of the Stakeholder Engagement Committee of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka)