More than 5000 Govt. schools with less than 200 students: Auditor General
View(s):- Some of these schools lack facilities, others have excess teachers
- According to the report, the teacher-student ratio in Sri Lanka is 1:17.
Half of Sri Lanka’s Government schools have fewer than 200 students, a special report by the Auditor General’s Department revealed recently.
Citing the 2017 school census report, the Auditor General’s report on the performance of Government schools with low student numbers said 5,161 of the 10,194 Government schools had fewer than 200 students.
The report also revealed that there were 859 non-Government schools, 265 international schools, 80 private schools, 26 special schools and 753 pirivenas in 2017. The Government schools were divided into 9,841 provincial schools and 353 national schools.
According to the report, the teacher-student ratio in Sri Lanka is 1:17. But 19 percent of total students numbers currently in schools were in the national schools, which comprise 3.5 percent of the country’s schools.
Reasons for a low student population in certain schools were listed by the Auditor General as follows include: parents who did not want to send their children to “small schools”, teachers who did not want to teach in “small schools”, schools with better facilities and resources and the existence of isolated villages.
The report also said, schools which should have been closed down were kept open and maintained in a poor state, as these school principals did not allow these schools to be shut down.
To minimise disparity in resources and facilities, schools were given physical resources through projects like ‘The Nearest School is the Best School 2016-2020’. But, while the project was estimated at around Rs 64.9bn, by December 2018 less than half that amount — Rs 31.2bn — had been spent.
This project aimed to provide classrooms with modern facilities, primary education resources centres, junior and secondary laboratories, aesthetic units, teacher quarters, canteens with nutritious food, sports complexes, sanitary facilities, health units, a water supply (still required in 1,145 schools) and a modern electricity supply.
However, in most cases, provisions were only made for a single purpose in each education zone. The Auditor General report had identified that each allocation of funds was not specific to the needs of each school.
For instance, 73 schools in the Matugama education zone urgently needed drinking water but the project had not met this requirement.
In 2018, there were no new national schools but 17 provincial schools were established. The number of schools opened after 2000, which had less than 200 students is 373.
Half of these schools were in the Northern and Eastern provinces. Six such schools had fewer than 10 children. There was one school with one student, one school with five students, another with six students, two schools with eight students and one school with nine students.
A circular issued in January 2016 mentioned the number of academic staff needed in each school. The Auditor General found instances where some schools had insufficient staff, while others did not have enough. There was excess staff in certain schools with fewer than 200 students, but no action was taken to resolve this problem by transferring to schools which needed teachers.
-Thurushi Weerasinghe