Rs. one million for Western Province schools
View(s):The Western Province Education Department has allocated one million rupees each to eleven education zones that come under its department to prepare and distribute self-learning kits for students from grades six to ten.
Apart from self-study material, additional reading books are being printed and distributed to education zonal offices to be distributed to students via principals of provincial schools, Western Province Education Director Srilal Nonis told the Education Times.
“Last year students in the province attended school for only 94 days. Some schools conducted online classes, but it was not 100 percent successful in provincial schools. We are determined to keep educating students who are unable to participate in online sessions, and continue distant learning education despite the extended closure,” he said.
The Western Province has 7,32, 430 students in 1282 provincial schools in the Colombo, Homagama, Piliyandala, Sri Jayawardenapura, Gampaha, Kelaniya, Minuwangoda, Negombo, Horana, Kalutara, Matugama education zones.
“The Provincial Department drafted a COVID Emergency Response Plan, with the initial attention to O/L students in the province. We divided the Response Plan into programmes such as zonal level contingency response activities in student development, improving language competencies of students with marks below 40, implementing contingency emergency plan (CERP) activities in social science, non-formal education, ICT and health and physical education,” he said.
Mr. Nonis said under one of the programmes, model papers for O/L mathematics, science and English for Sinhala and Tamil medium students were printed and distributed early.
“This month, we focused on printing and distributing model papers for grade ten students, printing third term English language learning materials for students from grades six to ten and printing third term learning materials for primary students,” Mr. Nonis said.
According to him, by the end of January, students in the Western province would be equipped with additional study materials and model papers to cover the syllabus of last year’s third term.
(NF)