Will ‘Nearest School, Best School” Program Reduce Demand For Popular Schools?

By Asankha Pallegedara –July 23, 2016

Dr. Asankha Pallegedara

The ministry of education recently launched the ‘The Nearest School is the Best School’ or in Sinhalese ‘ලඟම පාසල හොදම පාසල’ program. According to ministry of education, the main objective of this program is to select two schools from each divisional secretarial division and develop them as ‘Smart Schools’ by providing required physical and human resources as in current leading and popular public schools, thereby minimize the demand for these popular schools. In this short article, I will critically assess this new initiative and discuss possible reasons why it will not necessarily decrease the current demand for popular schools.

Of course there are many positives in this program if implemented as proposed. According to ministry of education, government has already allocated over 48 billion rupees for this new program despite the critics of declining trend in public education spending over time. It is reported that two selected schools from each divisional secretarial division will be provided with basic facilities such as electricity, water and sanitation as well as sophisticated educational facilities such as information and communication technology (ICT), science laboratories, language labs, auditoriums, playgrounds and swimming pools. Further, school principals and teachers from these selected ‘Smart Schools’ will be offered foreign training in order to improve the teaching quality of these schools. In addition, education ministry aims to promote e-governance activities in the selected schools by introducing computer based office, library and evaluation systems.

However, it is highly unlikely that all these benefits given to these selected ‘Smart Schools’ will consequently achieve the main objective of decreasing the parents’ demand for enrolling their children into so called popular or elite public schools. First, these so called elite public schools are popular not just because they have more facilities such as swimming pools, auditoriums and laboratories. Most of these schools such as Royal, Ananda, Dharmaraja, Richmond, Mahinda, and Maliyadeva etc. have longstanding history often started in the British colonial period as elite private schools governed by either Christian missionaries or Buddhist Theosophical Society before taking over by government in 1961. These schools had prestigious and elite status long before they became government schools and only children from ‘elite class’ were able to enroll into these schools. After these schools became public schools, parents especially middle class were eager to enroll their children into these schools thereby create an increased demand for these schools. It is not just the quality of education of these schools, but longstanding prestigious status has created more demand for these schools. Therefore, by any means this new ‘smart schools’ may not be received attention from middle class parents same as established popular public schools.

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