Education is an investment for the future

Originally appeared on The Morning.

By Dhananath Fernando

Last week I was invited for a panel discussion by one of Sri Lanka’s leading stationery manufacturers. This was  for an initiative by them to support 100,000 families with children who are facing hardship due to the current economic crisis. 

According to their data, 50% of Sri Lanka’s families are struggling to support their children’s education. High inflation was mentioned as one main reason for this hardship.  Especially as more than 60% of what people earn have to be spent on basic food so what is left for education is shrinking. Unlike any other crisis, economic crises are the worst because it disrupts society. Inflation is not what the Central Bank says or what Prof.Steve Hanke’s updates as numbers. 

It is people’s pain, sorrow, emotion and helplessness. 80 page exercise books have increased from Rs. 75 to Rs. 100, 120 page books from Rs. 120 to Rs. 225. If you recall Sri Lanka’s World Champion Toastmaster Dhananjaya Hettiarachchi’s winning speech, he says mothers have three types of tears - tears of joy, tears of sorrow and tears of shame. There cannot be any sorrow or shame for a mother other than the inability to educate their loving children. Education is pretty much the most poor parents' insurance policy to overcome poverty at their later stage in life, especially in our context.

In Lebanon the protein intake came down by half and  35% of Lebanon’s 2 million student population have dropped out of school due to the current  economic crisis. As a result of this World Human Capital Index (2020) have projected that children born in Lebanon will only have 52% of productivity. 

So since Sri Lanka is on the same route as Lebanon,  it’s very unlikely that we would deviate far from Lebanon.  The impact of an economic crisis is beyond fuel queues and LP gas lines. Impact can run longer for generations. As Prof.Ricardo Hausmann from the Harvard Kennedy School mentioned, “economic crisis is the same as a civil war.”

So Sri Lanka has to be prepared to overcome this productivity deficit by reskilling and upskilling people. 

Sri Lanka keeps bragging about our skilled labor force and services exports of IT (Information Technology).  This is an industry that is already affected, especially as many such skilled individuals are migrating to greener pastures. Unskilled labour is remaining simply because they can’t afford to leave or they are not skilled enough to leave. Some are unskilled not due to any of their faults but due to economic conditions and flaws in the education system. 

Even though Sri Lanka moves somewhat forward towards economic reforms, after a few years we will experience a skilled labour shortage. When labour is in short supply investors don’t look at us and we become uncompetitive. 

Existing businesses will be further impacted and recovery would be challenging 

What can we do

Reskilling and upskilling our labour force is not just a function of formal education. It is mainly a function of working with co-skilled workers. For example, someone who works in a pizza restaurant has a higher chance of coming up with his or her own pizza recipe than someone just taking a degree in pizza. It's the same like someone who practices and bowls with Lasith Malinga will bowl better yorkers than someone who just watches Malinga bowling or someone just taking a theory course on bowling in cricket. 

So we have to revamp our labour regulations allowing foreign workers to come and work here specially for skilled job categories. That is one way we can attract investors. Not only will it attract investors it would reskill and upskill our own people through on the job training. We have to allow labor markets to work where hiring and firing is easy. 

If the government cannot spend money on education and if the government is too late to contain inflation then at least the government can change the archaic labour laws which have made Sri Lanka uncompetitive. 

While the support and the initiatives by the private sector in uplifting education is welcome, there are quite a lot that can be done with just a stroke of a pen which would have a very high impact at the same time. We need to do charity and reforms both to really survive this education crisis which has been triggered as a result of the economic crisis. 

The opinions expressed are the author’s own views. They may not necessarily reflect the views of the Advocata Institute or anyone affiliated with the institute.

We have a COVID education crisis; do not turn it into a catastrophe

Originally appeared on The Daily FT

By Dr. Sujata Gamage

We may recover from the health impact or the economic impact, but the impact of lost years of education for children or children lost to the system due to dropping out will present a COVID education catastrophe with long-term implications

Schools have been closed for more than 16 months. News of school closures and brief re-openings have dominated the news. Success at holding examinations gives us a false sense of achievement. The Minister of Education has been heard to say that online education is continuing despite school closings. Such statements show a complete lack of understanding of the ground situation.

At the ground level, yes, teachers have been reaching out to students as best as they can. According to a survey carried out by the Education Forum Sri Lanka in November 2020, almost all teachers have used social media such as WhatsApp to reach out to their students, but they have been able to connect to only 45% of the students on average. Of those only ~5% were reached via software such as Zoom or Teams which give a real-time online education experience. Even for the 45% total who were contacted by schools, the mode of education is really a repeat of the usual chalk-talk education, but now in distance mode. The objective is to ‘cover’ the syllabus.

However, more important than covering the syllabus is having the school contact each child to inquire after his/her situation. We all know that it is difficult for children to be trapped inside. But in addition, not every home is a safe place for children. Domestic disputes affect the kids. These disputes can turn violent. In some homes, children are abused. Some disadvantaged children who receive school lunches could go hungry when schools are closed. 

 Warnings by experts

At a recent policy dialogue by the Education Forum Sri Lanka, Dr. Tara de Mel warned that we may recover from the health impact or the economic impact, but the impact of lost years of education for children or children lost to the system due to dropping out will present a COVID education catastrophe with long-term implications. She made a plea for short-term remedies to reach out to each child, and for planning NOW to reopen schools as soon as the present third COVID-19 wave subsides. 

Weerasinghe, the Director of Education responsible for the Vavuniya South Education Division, echoed Dr. de Mel’s sentiments saying that the Vavuniya South division he represents has a diverse community from farmers in the interior to fishermen in the coastal areas, and children of such communities were difficult to contact. These children may have dropped out of education altogether.

Weerasinghe further said that during the lockdowns in 2020 rural schools gained somewhat on urban schools presumably because the small rural schools were able to work under the radar to bring children to school under health guidelines of local medical authorities. That is not possible now because the Ministry of Education has issued an all-encompassing closure of schools. Weerasinghe questioned the logic of applying equality of policies to a widely diverse set of schools. 

For example, policies regarding school openings are made with crowded urban schools with students from across the country in mind, when smaller schools serving a contained community could well stay open. We need school-based solutions, he emphasised. Further he noted that we need to give pride of place to teachers and expect them to take responsibility for the education of children under their charge and supporting the teachers to do their job.

Renuka Peiris, former Director of Health and Nutrition at the Ministry of Education, noted that children are now expected to learn in a home environment which is quite different from the school environment. To compensate, they need to be given a timetable appropriate for self-study in a home setting and teachers need access to model lessons. 

The teacher-student interactions should be tracked randomly to make sure that teachers are adapting well to the new mode. The focus in distance education is only on educational achievement and the three national examinations. Is that the objective of education, she asked?

There was consensus that there must be equal emphasis on student educational achievements, their social-emotional learning, and their health and well-being. In distance education the focus has entirely been on transmitting educational content, missing all three purposes of education.

Decentralising education management

Regarding decentralising education management allowing schools to make decisions about opening or closing of schools, Renuka Herath said that by statute the Director General of Health is the ultimate authority for all decisions related to a pandemic, but that power is delegated to Medical Officers of Health (MoH) at divisional level. At the school level, the principal may make the decisions in consultation with the MoH for the area, if power to make such a decision is delegated to the school level by the Ministry of Education. 

There is indeed a circular from the Ministry that authorises schools to just that (Circular 2020/15) but when the ministry decides that all schools, say in the Western Province, should be closed, school-based committees cannot override such a directive. The Ministry of Education should make decisions on school opening or closing with sensitivity to children attending smaller schools serving small communities.

Time to act

Taking the ground reality into consideration, the Education Forum Sri Lanka has called upon the Ministry of Education and Provincial Departments of Education to recognise and act on the following without delay:

1. Content delivered over TV, WhatsApp or in print form is not education: The archaic transmission mode of education practiced in the Sri Lankan education system came to the fore during COVID-19. Teachers sent PDF files over WhatsApp to parents with smartphones, clogging their phones and forcing them to get pages and pages of notes printed. Learning happens not in transmission but in the engagement of the child with the content under the guidance of a teacher. Teachers need only send instructions to use existing textbooks and workbooks which should have been made available free to students at the beginning of the year.

2. Parents cannot replace teachers. Schools are responsible for keeping home-bound students engaged 7:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on designated school days: A bi-weekly self-learning plan should be provided for each child and a teacher should follow-up with him/her at least once a day. Ninety six per cent of households in Sri Lanka have access to a mobile phone. Teleconferencing is possible with analogue phones. There is a teacher for every 16 students on average. There is no excuse for not reaching out to every child.

3. A reduced curriculum covering the essential learning outcomes in language and math, for example should be provided and teachers given the freedom to integrate learning outcomes in other subjects. The Academic Council of Bhutan, for example The Royal Education Council of Bhutan, for example, released an Education in Emergency (EiE) Prioritised and Adapted Curriculum as early as July 2020. National Institute of Education Sri Lanka has already identified ELC for primary education. 

4. Diagnostic tests to identify the “learning lags” in essential competencies should be made for Grades 5 onwards for use by students for self-assessment or by teachers for keeping track. These can be developed and administered by Provincial, Zonal or Divisional directorate level.

5. Modalities for engaging in learning should be entrusted to schools, with supervision by closest authority and subject to schools covering essential competencies: On average only 50% of students engage ‘online’ learning. If the curriculum is reduced, teachers can use the time saved to reach out to those unreached using offline methods suitable for each locality.

6. School attendance committees at GND Level should be reactivated to monitor and support home-bound children: Children’s anxieties and mental health issues, abusive homes, poor nutrition are other critical issues. Regulation 1005/5 of 1997 mandated School Attendance Committees comprising principals, school development society representatives, and education health, and welfare authorities in each GND to keep track of families with school-age children. These committees should be reactivated immediately. 

7. Decisions regarding school opening/closures should be delegated to authorities as close as possible to the affected communities: Schools in low-risk areas should be allowed to keep open. Even in high-risk areas, principals, and teachers in consultation with relevant committees can decide on appropriate school re-opening schedules and isolation modalities. Strategic plans for a more permanent way of keeping schools open should be developed with vaccinations and testing underpinning such plans. 

8. Teachers are frontline workers. They should receive priority in vaccination: When health-care-workers are considered as frontline workers deserving immediate vaccination, the same should follow for teachers considering the repercussions of school closures across the society and the economy. 

9. Personnel and students in schools in high-risk areas should be tested regularly: A cost-effective testing system should be designed so that teachers and students are tested regularly. If a student or a teacher is tested positive, individual classrooms or groups of students should be isolated, instead of closing the entire school. 

10. Blended learning should be adopted as the norm when schools are in session so that teachers and students can transition smoothly to home-based learning during an emergency. Best-practices in this regard can be sourced from countries which have already adopted this kind of learning.

Dr Sujata Gamage is a Senior Research Fellow at LIRNEasia, a regional think tank based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. She specializes in planning, evaluation and capacity building in education, ICT in education, research and research networks, and public sector performance using data analytics, institutional research, scoping studies, systematic reviews, statistical methods and simulations. She is also an advisor to the Advocata Institute.

Education and economic success: How Covid-19 could have saved us

Originally appeared on The Morning

By Dhananath Fernando

It’s been over a year since the Covid-19 pandemic hit Sri Lanka. The pandemic entered our nation at a time when all Sri Lankans, regardless of their party politics, had very high hopes about a change in the political economic system – a “system change”. While Covid has posed a real challenge for any system change, it could have been interpreted as a blessing if we were to shift our gears from “needing a system change” to working on “implementing a system change”. In my mind, education reforms are probably the best place to start.

We tried to restrict Covid to being a healthcare crisis without letting it spill over to become an economic crisis, but to no avail. Now there is another crisis brewing in the corner, which hasn’t been given much attention – the “education crisis”, which has been exacerbated by the Covid pandemic and its economic aftermath.

Let’s understand the crisis first.

Even before Covid, it was not a secret that our education system was not supporting our economic aspirations. Starting from preschool to tertiary and vocational education, the education reforms have been mere promises; they have been limited to the pages of election manifestos, without any real work happening on the ground. This education crisis is far more complicated than ever before. There are significant flaws in the education structure as well as in the content taught.

Sri Lanka’s inability to produce complicated products and services is a good case study to evaluate our education system. What we have been taught over the years does not satisfy the areas of knowledge that are in demand. People who have had the talent and acquired the skills that meet global demand have been offered citizenship and very attractive opportunities all over the world, and Sri Lanka has not even thought of attracting them back.

The more serious problem is that we have not been taught the things that are important for the present and future. From my experiences, we haven’t been provided with the opportunity to really learn by ourselves, even if we wanted to. Most content and many curriculums are outdated and so we have been made incompetent and unable to meet global competition. From 2000- 2015, Sri Lanka has introduced only seven HS codes to our export basket. Our competitor Vietnam has introduced 48 and Thailand has introduced 70 HS codes to its export basket. Therefore, one of the main contributors to our ailing economy is education.

As a result, even after 70 years of independence, we are finding it difficult to compete, and our inability to compete and understand the market dimensions have pushed us into a corner. In order to counter our own lack of competitiveness, we are building walls of protectionism against a far more competitive world, which has further isolated us as a nation in a fast accelerating world.

It is not only about our knowledge of technical subjects; human values and qualities such as empathy, equality, caring, taking responsibility, self-discipline, and many other soft skills have not been developed to levels at which they should have been. The way our senior educated officials and some trade union leaders, who have had a science and technology-focused tertiary education, are attempting to manage a global-scale pandemic, is a classic case study to understanding the gaps in our education system.

With all these flaws we have continued on the same journey without making improvements. With the pandemic, our preschools, universities, and most of the tertiary education institutes have been closed or operating virtually for more than a year; some have adopted online teaching methods but some of the students who do not have internet or device access have been completely left out. Some students and families have been completely left out due to being unable to afford the internet (even though Sri Lanka is one country with comparatively low data charges), and for practical reasons such as a few kids requiring to study online at the same time. Additionally, learning how to learn online is the first step for a productive online learning experience, rather than just sharing the same notes online and delivering the same content in front of a camera.

Education reforms are complicated, but it is one area that can bring us significant economic benefits in the future – if done right, and in line with global education standards. To do this, reforms sacrifices in terms of political capital will have to be made.

Implementing such reforms will bring in newer opportunities.

First, the tertiary and university education system could have expanded through a new online platform. One of the main complaints has been the capacity of our universities. An online mechanism with proper online examinations could significantly increase the numbers getting enrolled at our universities. A parallel curriculum change could have been done with industry consultations, as the post-Covid economy in the world has opened more opportunities for hundreds of new subject streams. Even world-reputed universities such as Harvard and MIT are now offering new courses with the same credibility online at a very reasonable price.

Secondly, the teachers are at home, and this time, they should have been better utilised for teacher training and curriculum changes to uplift education standards.

To overcome the current crisis, ideally a special curriculum could have been made for primary and secondary schools with special focus on the critical content from the existing curriculum. That would have helped students focus on the important subjects and themes and catch up for time they already lost due to Covid. The same special curriculum should be the gateway for updating our education system and curriculum.

While we work on long-term curriculum changes and online education methods, teachers and the school administrations should be identified as frontline workers and vaccination drives should prioritise them so that schools can be reopened faster.

There have been attempts to utilise the current television network for education purposes, but it seems to have not been done in an organised manner. In the third wave, we are back to square one in facing our educational challenges and it is obvious that we have not learnt anything from the first and second waves of the pandemic.

We have to remember that reviving the economy from an education crisis is far more difficult than recovering from a healthcare crisis. If our people’s brains don’t work at the right speed and in the right direction, there is no way that we can drive the economic engine in the right direction.

That may be why former late South African President Nelson Madela eloquently said:

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

The opinions expressed are the author’s own views. They may not necessarily reflect the views of the Advocata Institute or anyone affiliated with the institute.