It’s been a long 18 months for school education, disrupted by Covid-19 and soured by trade union action by the teaching staff over the last few months. As schools islandwide begin reopening on a phased basis after the long closures, the issues that have underpinned the teacher strike are far from resolved; in fact trade unions threaten a return to striking if next month’s budget fails to address grievances.
These grievances stretch back 23 years; successive governments have failed to settle their salary disputes and the country has experienced the back and forth of trade union action and negotiated settlements throughout those two decades. The timing of this particular round of strikes has been particularly tragic, given that the little resilience left in our education system collapsed when the crisis emerged from within.
Sri Lanka’s much vaunted free education system has failed the stress test it just endured. It has left a large swathe of children behind, not just during the strike but long before that in the transition to home-based learning. The glaring inequalities in access, frequency and quality of the education received by over four million children has no doubt resulted in a massive amount of lost learning.
We never got our model right. The educators are fair in their argument that the state did nought to provide them the support to transition to online and hybrid teaching methods. For the sake of the children, teachers should have had the support of proper guidance and frameworks, technical input and devices, connectivity, software all pegged to a practical set of outcomes. Instead it was left to teachers to blindly find their way to a strange world sans face-to-face interaction and many responded by attempting to duplicate the classroom experience via screens. Teachers should also have been trained in using simple digital tools to deliver content designed to be effective in digital formats.
We have failed our children because even through this long school closure, we are yet to have reliable figures of what type of education, if any, reached which of the 4.3 million school-going children in Sri Lanka. What has been apparent is that the most vulnerable have been excluded the most and their parents will suffer the burden for longer. They are the families that can barely afford private tuition at the best of times; add to this, pandemic-related job insecurities and blows to income have meant that parents are under severe strain to resort to private tuition. It is worthy of note that teachers have not faced any restrictions to their public sector salaries despite the strike.
The private tuition industry remains a systemic failure of our free education system; but it’s important to note that it is not just a local phenomenon. What started as extra support so some students would not fall behind, soon became a prayer to parental anxiety about the quality of schools and is now, even for those with access to high quality school education, a path for getting ahead of the competition. It is an industry that thrives despite the pandemic, and has by and large, made a quick transition to online learning (and digital payments).
Disruptions to education, such as this one, have the potential to become watershed moments where an entire system can be overhauled to make the leap to a new generation of learning. Our system is in dire need of such an overhaul but Sri Lanka is far from geared to make any change. It is a pity that once schools start, Sri Lanka goes back to the same old formats that are outdated, uninspiring and unlikely to give us any competitive advantage. If only we were willing to listen and learn, there are lessons to be learnt from around the world about how education systems coped, adapted, built capacity and emerged stronger to thrive beyond the pandemic. Instead, Sri Lanka must now focus on the bare minimum – getting teachers back to schools and making them stay there.
Learning little from a lengthy lapse
24 Oct 2021
Learning little from a lengthy lapse
24 Oct 2021
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