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Teachers’ boycott means no A/L exams in October
The Education Ministry has again back-tracked on holding this year’s Advanced Level (A/L) examinations in October – as announced last week – following the decision by state school teachers to withdraw from the online teaching platform.
The withdrawal is a protest against the arrests of demonstrators opposing the Kotelawela education bill, which seeks to privatise education at the Kotelawela Defence Academy (KDU).
Exacerbating the situation, the protesters – representing several education trade unions – after being released on bail from the Colombo Magistrates Court, were bundled into waiting buses and taken away for 14 days’ quarantine at the northern air force camp in Mullaitivu.
All 242,000 teachers serving in government schools countrywide have joined hands to boycott online teaching, demanding that the trade union leaders be released from quarantine.
As a result, online education, which has been the major means of imparting education to students during the pandemic, has been totally shut down.
With teachers and principals on strike, students said they have no way of applying for their A/L exams, scheduled to be held on October 4. They complained this week that school administrations have not turned up for work and there were no office staff to process the paperwork for applications.
The ministry has asked all students to send in their applications online.
The boycott is also hampering the process of applying for National Identity Cards to sit the Ordinary Level exams.
Teachers claim the boycott will affect only children who have online study capability, citing surveys that show only 40 per cent of the 4.3 million students living in urban areas and close to telecom towers benefit from online classes.
Royal College Kurunegala Principal R.M. Ratnayake said only a third of students in his school follow online teaching. Children faced problems of data coverage, and many lacked devices such as computers and smartphones to tap into online learning.
Holding national exams in this situation would be unjust to a significant proportion of students, he conceded.
Ceylon Teachers Union (CTU) Nuwara Eliya District Secretary V. Indraselvan insisted the online boycott by teachers would not greatly affect students as only 40 per cent of students in the Central Province benefited from online learning.
“Only those in towns and those who can afford sophisticated devices have benefited,” he said.
He said the current protest would intensify, turning to other demands including the revision of salary anomalies, an increase in education funding in the next Budget and push the government to expedite vaccinations and reopen schools early.
The Sri Lanka Education Forum, a non-governmental body promoting education, has called for the exams to cover just a third of the curriculum and for the remaining curriculum content to be assessed through activity-based modules.
The Ordinary Level exams should only cover core subjects, the organisation added.
Last week, the government insisted the A/L exams would cover the entire syllabus.
The forum called for consistency in ministry decision-making on the holding of exams.
“A new national policy on holding examinations is the need of the hour,” it said.
It urged the government to bring forward reform policies planned to be implemented in 2023 to help schoolchildren gravely affected by the pandemic and to make conditions equitable for disadvantaged students by giving them more resources.
The forum accused the government of having not taken any meaningful steps to reopen schools in the 15 months of pandemic.
Education Minister G.L. Peiris assured parents this week that schools would be reopened next month once the vaccination programme for government schools teachers has been completed.