The Education Quarterly Reviews is an Open Access publication. It may be read, copied, and distributed free of charge according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.The Asian Institute of Research Education Quarterly Reviews is a peer-reviewed International Journal. The journal covers scholarly articles in the fields of education, linguistics, literature, educational theory, research, and methodologies, curriculum, elementary and secondary education, higher education, foreign language education, teaching and learning, teacher education, education of special groups, and other fields of study related to education. As the journal is Open Access, it ensures high visibility and the increase of citations for all research articles published. The Education Quarterly Reviews aims to facilitate scholarly work on recent theoretical and practical aspects of Education.

This study explores the impact of the adoption of enterprise risk management (ERM) practices on firm performance. A sample of forty five banking and finance companies listed on the Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE) was selected for this study and uses both primary and secondary data for the empirical analysis. The extent of adoption of ERM practices was assessed by using the ERM integrated framework of committee of sponsoring organization (COSO) of the Treadway Commission of USA. Return on equity (ROE) is used as a proxy to measure the firm performance and uses multivariate regression analysis to assess the impact of key ERM functions on firm performance. This study finds none of the eight key ERM functions suggested by the COSO’s ERM integrated framework has a significant impact on firm performance. Event identifications, risk assessment, risk response and information & communication indicate a positive impact on firm performance. However, none of those impacts were significant. Surprisingly, empirical evidence reveals that objective setting; event identification, control activities and monitoring of ERM functions have a negative, but not significant, impact on the firm performance. These findings induce the corporate managers to pay a close attention to the cost-benefits considerations when designing and implementing ERM practices and not heavily relied upon and extensively invest on ERM as a vehicle for creating firm value.

The objective of this empirical study is to explore the effect of the adoption of ERM on the performance of the diversified industry of Sri Lanka. The extent of the adoption of ERM is assessed based on eight ERM functions recognized by the ERM integrated framework of the committee of sponsoring organization of the Treadway Commission and use return on equity as a proxy to measure firm performance. This study finds ERM supportive internal environment, risk-aligned objective setting, event identifications, and risk response have a positive impact on firm performance. However, none of those impacts were statistically significant. Surprisingly, empirical evidence reveals that risk assessment and control activities have a negative impact on the firm performance. Information & communication and monitoring functions indicate a significant impact on firm performance. Nevertheless, monitoring function shows a negative impact on the firm performance. The researcher believes this negative impact is attributable to the increased cost of monitoring activities that is crucial for a diversified business setup. This empirical evidence induces the researcher to conclude that, except for communication and monitoring, the adoption of ERM has no significant impact on the firm performance. These findings are contradictory with the findings of prior researchers.

Education system plays a very crucial role in any country towards achieving a sustainable development and strengthening social, cultural, historical and integral development, and is often called as the back born of the society. Producing competent graduate, professional or technical expert and a responsible citizen enriched with social and cultural values, which eventually enhances the quality of a country's workforce, is one of the ways the education system contributes to the development of a country. Giving the due recognition to the importance of the education system that paves the way for integral development of a country, some countries have practiced and promotes a free education policy. The purpose of this paper is to explore the salient features and its evolution of the free education system in Sri Lanka and its emerging challenges for policy makers. This paper also aims at suggesting alternative strategies to overcome the challenges that are emerging from the changing global market context by pooling of views and ideas of academics and other experts in the field of education. This study expects to suggest alternative strategies to overcome the emerging issues in the free education system that would add value to the policy makers to objectively develop future strategies and policies relating to the education system of the country. In order to achieve the aforesaid objective, this study explores the existing literature relating to education systems and experts' views and authors' own experience as academics. This study demonstrates that the Sri Lankan education system requires an urgent reform to revise on a holistic approach to address emerging issues in the areas of policy making level, implementation level and supervisory and regulatory level. This study recommends providing annually a six percent from the GDP for the state education, eliminating disparities between rural and urban popular schools, timely revision of general school curriculum in order to make it best fit the changing world, promoting student centered and participatory learning environment, protecting the higher education right of the qualified students who are not absorbed by the state universities and protecting and enhancing the economic, career and social welfare of the school teachers as the key areas that the policy makers must pay their close and urgent attention.

Enterprise risk management (ERM) has gained an increased attention during the recent past as an integrated approach to manage risk for creating and preserving firm value. The objective of this study is to explore and empirically verify as to whether the adoption of the ERM has an impact on the firm performance. This study uses both primary and secondary data pertaining to 129 companies listed on the Colombo Stock Exchange under the banking & finance, insurance, diversified, manufacturing, food and beverage and chemical and pharmaceutical sectors. Primary and secondary data are collected by distributing a survey questionnaire and analyzing the published financial statements of the observing companies. Researcher adopts ERM integrated framework suggested by the committee of sponsoring organization (COSO) of the Treadway Commission of the USA to assess the value relevance of ERM and uses return on equity (ROE) as a proxy to measure the firm performance. This study finds, except for control activities, none of the key ERM functions, suggested by the COSO’s ERM integrated framework, has a significant impact on the performance of listed companies. Internal environment, objective setting, and information & communication indicated a weak positive impact on the firm performance. Nevertheless, none of those impacts were statistically significant. Empirical evidence reveals that firms’ risk responding strategies have no impact on the performance. Surprisingly, monitoring of ERM functions has weak negative, but not significant, impact on the firm performance. These findings are contradictory with the theoretical expectation that the adoption of ERM practices has a positive impact on firm performance as confirmed by the prior researchers.