‘Grade 1 admission issue continues to drag on’ – Joseph Stalin

(FASTNEWS | COLOMBO) – The Ceylon Teachers Union has charged governments have thus far failed to formulate a suitable mechanism for the admission process issue faced by grade one students.

Speaking to a prominent online news portal in the isle, the CTU Secretary Joseph Stalin attributed the reason for this, is that the existing school system in the country has not been improved up to an acceptable standard in schools across the island and that parents generally leaned towards admitting their children only to popular schools.

He said admission of students to grade one has become a major issue in Sri Lanka, adding though many governments in the past pledged to introduce various proposals in this regard to tackle the problem, none of them were successfully implemented.

He explained that though 10,164 schools exist in Sri Lanka, the issue affected around 800 of these schools, adding even so the issue primarily revolved around 36 highly popular schools in particular.

He said the trend of attempting to admit every student to a mainline school was one of the most pressing issues, explaining that though the teacher – student ratio in the country stood at 1-20 at present and despite a large network of schools in the country, parents continued to be bent on admitting children only to a select few schools.

Stalin said therefore the present government must intervene in order to establish an island-wide school system with suitable standards, in order to resolve this contentious issue.