• Teachers who supervise and guide students the need of the hour
• Educational reforms aim to build creativity, ingenuity, teamwork, communication skills
• Modular and self-learning in place of memorising
• PTF aims to reduce unskilled labour in population to 10% by 2025

  By Sarah Hannan Reforming a country’s education system is a difficult task. While it is easy to amend an existing system, it is challenging to reform and reorganise it. Sri Lanka’s upcoming education reforms will see drastic changes in several sectors. In this regard, the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on Sri Lanka’s Educational Affairs has set up a goal to reduce the population of unskilled labour to 10% by 2025. The PTF had recommended that in order to effectively change the education system and its outcome in future, supporting learning content and curricula need to be developed, learning infrastructure to facilitate the reformed curricula must be improved, and policy-level interventions have to be introduced. Following such recommendations, the Ministry of Education, along with the National Institute of Education (NIE), has been working on the reforms that are taking place in the country. With schools reopening after prolonged closure due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the education system having the dire need to cover subject matter in a short span of time, the Ministry of Education and the NIE prepared modules for subjects taught in all grades in the past months. According to NIE Director General Dr. Sunil Jayantha Navaratne, children will be able to complete these modules in a span of 10 hours. “Our education consists only of the parts of reading, writing, and mathematical ability. However, 21st Century education requires learning skills, literacy skills, and life skills. We hope to give the child the same creativity, ingenuity, ability to work with others, communication skills, and flexibility through new educational reforms. “According to the present system of education, after the teacher conducts a lesson, the students take down notes, and then sit for the examination. Therefore, the current education system only measures knowledge and memory, and does not assess the creativity, ingenuity, and communication skills of the child. Moreover, we need to create teachers who supervise and guide children rather than lecture them,” Dr. Navaratne observed. Dr. Navaratne also noted that the NIE hoped to develop general education through six objectives; 

• Raise an individual who can actively contribute to national development
• Produce an efficient and productive employee or a skilled self-employed person
• Build up a person with good entrepreneurial skills or mindset
• Produce a patriotic citizen
• Produce a good human being
• Create a good family member

In developing an active person who can contribute to the development of the country, the NIE is working on customising education to enable each child to contribute to the national economy according to their abilities and talents. The NIE believes that education should contribute to creating more efficient and effective workers. “We hope that under these new educational reforms, we will be able to inculcate an entrepreneurial mindset in children. Accordingly, in order to create a good entrepreneur, the necessary skills and mentality should be cultivated through education,” Dr. Navaratne elaborated. No easy feat Speaking about the ongoing reforms that are taking place, State Ministry of Education Reforms, Open Universities, and Distance Learning Promotion Secretary Dr. Upali Sedara noted: “It has been easy to introduce reforms in preschool education, as there was a lack of policy for it. Therefore, we were able to design a policy for preschool education and get the Cabinet approval for it. In the meantime, there are several changes taking place in the curriculum of the secondary education system in the country, which is taking place from junior secondary classes to GCE Advanced Level (A/L) classes.” According to Dr. Sedara, the school education sector covering grades one to 13 is known as general education; it is further divided into three segments – primary education (grades one to five), junior secondary education (grades six to 11), and secondary school education, which takes place during GCE A/L classes (grades 12 to 13). “If we attempt to change the content that is found in textbooks and continue to follow the existing system of education, it is not going to work. We will be unable to change society as well. Over the past 70 years, we have failed to change the education system and now we are facing the consequences,” Dr. Sedara further explained. Said reforms would ensure access to an education that is reflective of current and evolving industry needs and inculcate curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, and empathy in students. These changes will contribute to the creation of a generation that is disciplined, healthy, stress-free, and possesses an inquisitive mind, instead of a generation that is stressed due to a competitive environment and possesses only book knowledge. As Dr. Sedara stated, the new reforms in education will change this method of education. “We have recognised the importance of developing citizens’ knowledge, skills, and capabilities so the country could progress. To achieve that, we have to create an environment that provides our youths and local entrepreneurs with new opportunities, giving everyone new hope and a sense of pride, where people can use their skills, talents, and business acumen to be world leaders in any field of their choice.” When asked as to how different the reformed education system would be from the current education system, Dr. Sedara explained that the Sri Lankan school system is driven by exam-based education and children are required to memorise the lesson content in their textbooks and reproduce it when answering exams. “The new, reformed curricula would be modular-based learning, which encourages the child to self-learn and complete activities of assignments for which they would use their creative and cognitive abilities. This, in return, can also improve a child’s ability to work in groups and give them the opportunity of learning through research as well,” Dr. Sedara concluded.