Sri Lanka - Institut de statistique de l'Unesco

Out-of-School Children in Sri Lanka: Country Study
First and foremost, it must be noted that children in all dimensions who are living in Northern and
Eastern Provinces have had their access to education severely affected by conflict and its
continuing impact on the education system. All the limited data that are available indicate that
children in these regions are more disadvantaged than children in other parts of the country in
almost all aspects of the education system, including through political, governance, capacity and
financing barriers and bottlenecks.
To summarize, weaknesses in the administration of education have had a negative impact on the
quality of education. At the local level, there is confusion caused by overlapping instructions from
central and provincial authorities under the policy of devolution. Coordination among relevant
officials at the local level is weak or non-existent, planning is affected by the lack of capacity
among some local officials, monitoring has low priority, and data collected at divisional level are
not readily available. Financing barriers are mostly related to a decline in expenditure on
education.
Children in Dimension 1, pre-primary school age, are most severely impacted by the lack of
funding for ECD centres. They are also affected by lack of birth certificates.
Primary-school-age children in Dimension 2 are impacted by lack of funding and politicization of
the system that prevents their local authorities from accessing the resources needed to build an
effective school system in their area. They are also affected by lack of birth certificates.
Children in Dimension 3 are also affected lack of political commitment and politicization of the
system as well as lack of funding. Supply-side barriers to secondary education are closely
related to political, governance, capacity and financing barriers; greater political will for
secondary education would impact strongly on children in this dimension. These children are
also affected by lack of birth certificates.
Children in Dimensions 4 and 5 are impacted by lack of political commitment and politicization of
the system, weak coordination and implementation of programmes, and poor monitoring and
data collection. These issues all combine to hamper the smooth functioning of the education
system, resulting in poor quality schools that are a discouragement to continued learning.
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