Hasini Lecamwasam
My ongoing fieldwork on agrarian politics in Sri Lanka is teaching me many things that are not directly related to, but heavily condition what happens in agriculture. I’m learning how the dynamics of everyday domestic life impact agrarian decisions: whether or not the credit taken for agriculture purposes is always actually spent on it; how intimate relationships impact farming activities (who is entering into or refusing labour exchange relations with whom, for instance); and how decisions about children – their nutrition, education, prospects – condition decisions people make about what to cultivate and when, among other things. It is in this context that I noticed many things about Sri Lanka’s school education system as it unfolds in the peripheries. My aim in today’s piece is to make the case for more inclusive consultative processes and context-specific responses in education reform, in light of these realities.
Most of my fieldwork is conducted in Welikanda (Polonnaruwa) and Siyambalanduwa (Moneragala). I also paid some visits to Weli Oya (Mullaitivu). Of these, Welikanda and Weli Oya were created under the Mahaweli Development Scheme explicitly for the purpose of forming a ‘human shield’ against LTTE encroachment. Siyambalanduwa, even though bordering the East (Ampara), is less of a ‘border’ area in that sense, although it, too, was exposed to the violence of war. Siyambalanduwa is also largely made up of resettled communities, but most of them had come well before the onset of the war, as part of development projects which were also Sinhala colonisation schemes. All of them, however, are replete with resource scarcity issues, in education and outside of it.
These remote areas are hardly a first choice for teachers looking for placements, resulting in a perennial staff squeeze. Poor infrastructure (water scarcity, dilapidated quarters, etc.) and physical security concerns (elephants, reptiles, etc.) do little to incentivise applicants. A retired principal I spoke to in one of these areas said they had to mostly rely on those with only O/L qualifications to discharge teaching duties at her school because people didn’t want to come there, despite it being a national school. Those who do come, she said, seek transfers immediately after the mandatory service period is up.
Resource scarcity in schools also seems to exacerbate the impact of domestic crises, because schools are not equipped to effectively respond to their spillovers. For example, in many of these locations, people spoke of the breakdown of families as a pervasive problem. My interlocutor in one such area shared how her mother leaving the family had resulted in her younger brother going into depression. In desperation, she had gone to his class teacher to request her to pay him additional attention given the situation. In two-three months when her brother had refused to go to school altogether, she had gone back to the teacher, who could not remember her or her brother.
Far from blaming the teacher in this instance, I see two larger issues: 1) There simply aren’t enough teachers to respond to such requests for individual attention. In border areas where the breakdown of families seems to be the rule rather than the exception, even the usual numbers of staff typical of a school might be inadequate. 2) There has been no investment in training (in counselling, for example) the teachers who do service these schools. Seeing as there’s not enough of them to even discharge regular teaching duties, this may already be too much to ask.
There were two other issues that also circled back to resource scarcity. The first is the appointment of teachers to primary school without first providing them with sufficient training in formative education. As is well known by now, the importance of formative education cannot be emphasised enough. The Sri Lankan system does not seem to have realised this, however, as evidence by its lack of investment in primary education. A primary school teacher I spoke with lamented that she herself felt that she was doing grave injustice by the students, and that the one-week training on formative education they received was singularly inadequate. An upper school appointment where she could teach Political Science, the subject she is qualified to teach, does not seem forthcoming. Hers is not an isolated case. The ‘unemployable graduate’ is the result of wrong placements: when people are given jobs they’re not equipped to deliver, they become redundant, while those in need of their services have to make do with whatever service providers are capable of giving. It is not so much that the civil service is inflated, but that wrong appointments are made to wrong places, when right appointments can make all the world’s difference to those most in need of public services.
The second issue concerns special needs children, which has an amplified impact in resource-scarce contexts. According to the same primary school teacher, there are not enough facilities to respond to the needs of such children. She shared that the special needs section previously instituted in many schools was dismantled in the interest of full integration of children with special needs to wider society, as a means of protecting their rights. However, in a context of serious underfunding, this simply translates into neglect as teachers struggle with classrooms that are big enough as it is. In 99% of the cases, there has also been no investment in special needs education that would have enabled these teachers to effectively engage with such students. Very few well-endowed schools in the entire country have a system in place to make this transition work – special needs units staffed by trained teachers, and a couple of hours every day in other classrooms – while teachers in the vast majority of schools have to make do with keeping special needs children occupied enough to not ‘annoy’ other children. Needless to say, this undermines the very purpose of dismantling special needs sections.
Given these realities, all of which are well known, I found President Dissanayake’s claim that “some schools may need to be closed, some merged, and in certain areas, new schools must be established” (available at https://www.newsfirst.lk/2025/07/25/%E2%80%9Cno-child-left-behind%E2%80%9D-president-calls-for-overhaul-of-school-dropout-crisis) not only problematic, but also in serious misalignment with his own educational reform package. According to the President, the reforms seek to ensure “no child is left behind”. Dr. Harini Amarasuriya, the Prime Minister and Minister of Education, also said in a recent interview in this connection that the government’s intention is to make sure that the students who go to underprivileged schools will get a better education than they do at present (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjmPunkM80A). How this is to be achieved by closing down or merging schools that are not doing so well is unclear.
In what is now becoming an increasingly evident neoliberal bend, the NPP government is framing its case for reform in terms of the performance records of individual schools – dropout rates, number of students, etc. (available at https://www.newsfirst.lk/2025/07/25/%E2%80%9Cno-child-left-behind%E2%80%9D-president-calls-for-overhaul-of-school-dropout-crisis), casting them as ‘unviable’ without due regard to systemic issues that render the situation so: these include factors such as economic hardships of families, lack of attention of successive governments, teachers (and in fact others in the public service) attempting to avoid working in such ‘difficult’ areas, their remoteness increasing as a result, and each of these factors feeding the others in cyclical fashion. In such a context, individualisation of responsibility paves the way for the “survival of the fittest”: schools that are ‘viable’ because they are already doing well, to whom whether or not reforms are introduced makes very little difference.
To avert disastrous failure, educational reforms need to be consultative and inclusive in the most substantive sense possible. Rather than being just an exercise to tick the boxes, the government needs to really invest the time and energy to go to communities that cannot come to Colombo for meetings; communities that are likely to be unaware of such a process in the first place. This alone would steer the government away from ‘national’ reforms, committing instead to ones that are responsive to varied local needs.
