Interview
New Education Act in Sri Lanka by Mid-2011 Dr G B Gunawardena, Vice Chairman, National Education Commission, Sri Lanka talks to Dr Rajeshree Dutta Kumar and Juanita Kakoty about the formulation of the New Education Reforms Act in Sri Lanka and the major concerns to improve the education system in the country
Where does Sri Lanka stand in terms of its education scenario vis-à-vis standards in South Asia or the globe? Amongst the South Asian countries, Sri Lanka has done well in the education sector. Since 1948, several education reforms have been undertaken, like free education from kindergarten to the university level. Already, our country has achieved 98% enrollment at the primary level and 90% participation at the secondary level. Now, a new framework has been introduced in the Parliament. By the mid of this year, it is expected that the new Education Act will come about in Sri Lanka ensuring education for all by 2015 in the country. With appropriate measures and by implementing adequate mechanisms to include the marginalised children, we shall be able to achieve 100% education by 2015. Kindly elaborate on the new Education Act to be rolled out. What are the primary concerns? The new Education Act has been developed keeping in mind major concerns. There has been an attempt to ratify and fulfill several international conventions as well. The Act shall alter the equation of reaching out to the privileged. The new Act would respect and protect
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the right to education of every child. There are few major concerns against which the new Education Act has been designed. Teaching has always been a respected profession in our country. But during the last few decades, market economy forces have influenced the behaviour of teachers making them behave like workers not professionals. This is a big challenge. We have to bring in teacher reforms not by a code of ethics, but through sensitising them of their roles as mentors. Without this, no education reform acts would succeed. Another concern is management and leadership in the teaching profession, which was earlier taken care of by the community. But in the recent past, the schools have been managed by adopting principles of industrial management, which is not very relevant to education. Now, that the discipline of educational management has been developed, we are making use of it so that principals and teachers would once again act as professionals and not bureaucrats. Bureaucracy does not necessarily help in achieving the aims of education. Sri Lanka faces the problem of finding resources or funding for education. At the moment, the government is not in a position to spend too much in the education sector. A total of 2.8% of the GDP is scheduled for education,
which is not sufficient. We depend on donor funding for development activities. But the major problem here is that donor agencies have their own agenda. They are interested in ‘their’ needs and not in ‘our’ needs. So we need to foresee that the donor funding comes into our sector-wise programme. We have shifted from the project mode to sectorwise programmes. These concerns are looked after in the new Act. How do you see the new Act addresses the issues of digital divide? In Sri Lanka, despite a high enrollment ratio, some schools have all the facilities, while others are in poor shape. The new Act promises to arrest disparities in the school system. The Acts ensures that all the schools will come under the State. In the future, we see a number of primary schools feeding into the secondary schools. Equity will be achieved thus. As another measure, we are going to recruit teachers with teaching qualifications. The practice has been to recruit teachers without any teaching qualification; this will be done away in the future. We have four services – teacher service, teacher education service, principal service and the administrator service. A Quality Assurance Council will be established in the country to regulate