National school (Sri Lanka)

A National school (Sinhalese: ජාතික පාසල, Jathika Pasala, Tamil: தேசியப் பாடசாலை) in Sri Lanka is a school that is funded and administered by the Ministry of Education of the central government as opposed to Provincial schools run by the local provincial council. These schools provide secondary education (some including collegiate), with some providing primary education as well. The classification began in 1985, with 18 schools being designated as national schools. Today, there are 342 National Schools in country constituting 3 percent of total National and Provincial Schools.

With the decentralization of government administration following the establishment of provincial councils from the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1987, the central government transferred control of government schools, with the exception of 18 elite schools that had been designated as national schools by the Ministry of Education in 1985. The criteria for listing as a national school were as follows:

Most of the selected schools were from Colombo along with several other cites. In the following five years only five schools were declared national schools, based on the initial criteria.

In 1990 the criteria were revised:

Following this change there was a gross increase in schools being upgraded to national school grade with a total of 37 national schools in 1992 and 165 in 1994. In most cases upgrade appeared to be a mere name change with no tangible change as by 2000 there were 317 national schools island wide.

The National Education Commission stated on the situation in 2003: "... the new category of a limited number of National Schools created in the early 1980s using strict criteria to identify schools with very good facilities and offering quality education, has become meaningless and distorted with the indiscriminate addition of schools that do not conform to these criteria. Currently 40 of the 323 National Schools are 1C schools (without Science education at GCE Advanced Level) and one National School is a Type 2 school with classes to GCE Ordinary Level only".

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