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School admissions on the decline

By Shehan Moses

Sri Lankan schools are facing a huge dilemma with the reduction in new admissions to grade one being approximately 10,000 to 15,000 every year, the Education Ministry claims.

A Ministry spokesman told The Sunday Leader that this trend has been observed during the past decade with a drastic reduction of at least 10,000 admissions being observed each year.

According to the spokesman, in the year 1992, the all island student population stood at 4,289,334 with a slight increase from 1993 to 1995 being observed. In 2002, the figure fell to 4,027,075 students and this year, the figure has plummeted to 3.975,255 showing a serious downward trend.

What is more alarming is the forecasting by the Ministry spokesman that the figure would drop to around 3,801,303 students in 2008. The spokesman said that poverty and a drastic drop in the population growth were the main contributory factors to the alarming trend. “ It is most unhealthy to a developing nation,” he noted.

While the students may be on the decline, the teachers are definitely not. The Ministry is grappling with the problem of an excess of teachers with little opportunity to absorb them in to the government sector.

However, the country still suffers from a lack of Tamil medium teachers. Currently, there is a marked shortage of some 10,121 teachers to teach in the Tamil medium while there are some 6,704 Sinhala medium teachers in excess.

In the coming year, the Ministry intends recruiting 765 Tamil language teachers to teach music, dancing, technology and physical education followed by 585 new recruitments in 2005.

With the dearth of Tamil educated teachers, the Ministry is considering the recruitment of those with G.C.E. Ordinary Level qualifications and Advanced Level, as graduate teachers are not available. 

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