Sri Lanka’s initiative of transforming the School Education System as the Foundation of a Knowledge Hub with World Bank assistance has failed to gain expected results owing to administration weaknesses, officials said.
World Bank has provided US$ 100 million for the programme for the benefit of 4million children and 235000 teachers in the island.
This was one of the several Foreign Funded Projects e in operation during the year 2018 under review for the development of primary and secondary education in the schools and technical education.
Action has been taken to promote infrastructure facilities to implement the Technology Stream of education in the schools under the Transforming the School Education System as the Foundation of a Knowledge Hub Project.
.However, school equipment distributed under the project have not been receiving by the relevant schools on scheduled dates, as a result of weakness in the distribution system, officials said.
The government audit inspection discovered that the remaining such equipment had been unused due to shortage of school teachers, inadequate building facilities etc.
Further, scientific equipment valued at Rs 13.07 million distributed among 45 schools in the Ratnapura district had not been used due to inferior quality.
The supplier had not taken action to provide the computers valued at Rs 24.90 million to the Provincial English Education Centres on due dates, audit query revealed.
According to the information made available at present , there were 10,284 students in the Special Education Units in 112 national schools and 704 provincial schools in Sri Lanka
It was observed that 597 posts of qualified teachers to serve in the Special Education Units had remained vacant as at 31 December 2018 whilst deploying 158 teachers trained for special education purposes to teach other subjects.
Further, 189 teachers trained for special education purposes had been assigned to the schools which do not have Special Education Units, audit report highlighted.
(LI)