Sri Lanka Education Forum

COLOMBO: President Mahinda Rajapaksa yesterday urged the teaching community to serve the poor and the less-privileged students in the remotest areas of the country and thereby protect the country's 'Free Education' mechanism. President Rajapaksa was speaking at the handing over of appointment letters to Diploma Holders in Teaching to 2,599 new diplomates. Making a symbolic handing over of appointment letters to a selected number of teachers who had successfully completed their training and qualified to receive the 'Diploma in Teaching' for 2007, the President asserted that his Government aims to provide equal opportunities in education to all, sans any irregularities, ...

By Deepal Warnakulasuriya Only half the G.C.E. Ordinary Level students who sat for the last year examination had qualified for the G.C.E. Advanced Level. Nearly 524,000 candidates sat for the examination at 3,946 examination centres islandwide. out of them, 377,000 were school candidates while 146,000 were private students. According to the latest data of the Department of Examinations, from 1998 there has been a steady decline in the pass rate. Every year the results were analysed by the Department but was not disclosed to the general public. But the National Symposium of Education which was held on May 12 under the directive ...

by Kumar David http://www.island.lk/2007/06/03/features1.html The results of the December 2006 GCE O-level examinations are appalling but not in the least surprising. The writing has been on the wall for years. The reasons are so well known that they hardly bear repetition - a breakdown of the school system, untrained and semi-qualified teachers, political interference, abandoning English, public indifference and screw-loose Education Authorities. As though all this was not bad enough, the solutions now proposed veer between taking the statistics to the massage parlour and superficial appeals to the ...

Continuing with the post on "real issue is the pass rate at Grade 9," I like go further and suggest that at this stage of development we need to spend our tax rupees on those completing Grade 1-9 basic education, and the rest should be asked to pay according to their means. (Yes, this means that all university students should be asked to pay something for their education, if not now, but later as they do with the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) in Australia). The labor force data for Sri Lanka are most revealing in this regard, particularly when you ...

A comment by Kusal in this forum about linking education and development prompted me to write this. He is right on target. We often hear about the 20,000 who qualify for university every year and how few actually get in. Now the latest furor is about only 48% passing the O/L when the pass rate has actually been increasing over the years. The more important statistic, I believe, is the pass rate after Grade 9, the end of compulsory education in Sri Lanka. 01. Grade 1  –   5   - Primary Level (05 Years) claritin 02. Grade 6  –   9   - ...