Free Education Policy and its Emerging Challenges in Sri Lanka

Abstract

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.

Students' attitudes on the use of Zoom in higher educational institutes of Sri Lanka

“…The GCE (A/L) (general certificate of education (advanced level)) examination determines students' eligibility for higher education in Sri Lanka. Due to the capacity constraints, nearly 18% of eligible students are admitted to state universities; 8% and 3% of eligible students continue their higher studies in state HEIs and non-state HEIs, respectively (Somaratna, 2020; Alawattegam, 2020). The level of study of the respondents was as follows: undergraduate 109 (59.6%), postgraduate 59 (32.2%) and diploma 15 (8.2%).…”

Emergency Teaching–Learning Methods (ETLM) during COVID-19: Lessons Learned from Sri Lanka

“…Free education in their native language was made available to all people, with a full range of facilities provided in schools around the country to ensure increased education access [3]. Although the government has a free education system, there is still inequality in access to educational facilities and resources [4]. However, as a result of the new normal situation created by material obstacles to online education.…”

Staying positive among negativities: strategies employed by teachers in Sri Lankan state universities to manage their wellbeing

“…From time to time, the government has also improved teacher quality and effectiveness through increasing salaries, introducing pecuniary and non-pecuniary incentives to attract talented personnel to the profession, and improve opportunities for professional development (Balasooriya, 2013). However, there is still a need to develop specific policies to promote teacher wellbeing, and this requires urgent attention (Alawattegama, 2020).…”