Primary Education Reform in Sri Lanka - Angela Little's website

Towards a Distinct Identity
Selection examinations were first introduced to schools in the 1860s. In 1862, students
in the English-medium schools were able to sit an eighth grade examination. Initially
this was used to select candidates for junior positions in the colonial government service,
and, subsequently, to award scholarships for study at the Colombo Academy. This
locally-designed eighth grade examination survived for eighteen years before the
introduction in 1880 of the University of Cambridge local examination and, in 1882, the
University of London matriculation examinations.
All three examinations were conducted in the English-medium. Those who had studied
in the vernacular-medium, Sinhala or Tamil, were denied access to junior colonial
government positions and scholarships at the Colombo Academy. Although a vernacular
teacher’s certificate was introduced in 1878 for males and in 1882 for females, vernacular
schools would have to wait until 1917 before the introduction of a Sinhala and Tamil
school leaving examination for their students.
The nineteenth century English-medium examinations became the benchmarks by which
individual and school success came to be judged. In the years leading up to independence
in 1948, access to fee-paying English-medium schools and English-medium examinations
became political issues. Although vernacular-medium education was fee-free, Englishmedium
education was not. Vernacular education was perceived as inferior to the
education offered in the English-medium in both government and grant-aided schools.
Vernacular education led even the most gifted child ‘no higher than to the comparatively
unremunerative posts of a vernacular teacher, an ayurvedic physician or a notary’ (Jayasuriya
1979). The Kannangara Committee argued that since the English-medium schools
offered the best employment opportunities and were attended only by those who
could pay fees, then equality of opportunity would become a reality for all only when
these superior schools were made free and open to all.
The Free Education Act was passed by the State Council in 1945. It was intended to
transform education from a ‘patrimony of the rich’ to an ‘inheritance of the poor’. Its
immediate consequence was that richer parents continued to send their children to
good government and government-aided schools without paying fees, while the masses
‘continued to receive free the poor quality education that had all along been free to
them’ (Jayasuriya 1979, 475). This continuing inequality was offset to a degree by the
system of scholarships designed to help able rural children to study in the Englishmedium
‘central schools’. These scholarships were the forerunners of the current day
Grade 5 scholarship examination.
The masses believed that their chances of high status jobs had increased through the
possibility of attending English-medium central schools in rural areas. This hope was
frustrated when, in 1948, Sinhala and Tamil became the official media of instruction in
all government schools, a policy that was introduced gradually, starting with Grade 1.
No government school was permitted to teach in English. As this language policy
worked its way up through the system, Sinhala-medium and Tamil-medium examinations
also came to replace English-medium examinations.
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