1,665 schools — including one national school — operate with fewer than 50 students each, the Daily Mirror reported, publishing a full breakdown of Ministry of Education statistics compiled for last year.
Those schools hold 49,189 students between them and have 10,324 teachers assigned to them.
The paper published the figures in the wake of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s remarks on restructuring the school system, in which he questioned the viability of running some schools with only a few students each.
What the full distribution shows
Set against the rest of the system, the concentration is stark. The complete banding runs:
| Students per school | Schools | Students | Teachers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fewer than 50 | 1,665 | 49,189 | 10,324 |
| 51–100 | 1,648 | 122,891 | 16,923 |
| 101–200 | 2,149 | 314,851 | 34,450 |
| 201–500 | 2,546 | 812,019 | 56,925 |
| Up to 1,000 | 1,208 | 831,999 | 4,071 |
| 1,001–1,500 | 372 | 448,994 | 23,804 |
| 1,501–2,000 | 186 | 318,966 | 16,041 |
| 2,001–3,000 | 192 | 459,537 | 21,744 |
| 3,001–4,000 | 68 | 230,518 | 10,214 |
| More than 4,000 | 33 | 158,580 | 6,813 |
Added up, the bands describe 10,067 schools and about 3.75 million students.
On those totals, the schools with fewer than 50 students are 16.5% of all schools but hold 1.3% of all students, while accounting for 5.1% of all teachers. Taken together with the 51–100 band, roughly a third of Sri Lanka’s schools (3,313) teach under 5% of its students — the arithmetic that the restructuring plan rests on.
Two figures that do not hold up
Two of the published numbers appear to be wrong, and both look like dropped digits rather than disputed data.
The 501–1,000 band lists 4,071 teachers for 831,999 pupils — a ratio of 204 pupils per teacher. Every other band in the table falls between 4.8 and 23.3, and the bands either side of it sit at 14.3 and 18.9. A figure near 49,000 would fit the pattern; 4,071 does not.
Separately, the Ministry’s teacher-count bands — 65 schools with fewer than 10 teachers, 4,242 with 10–25, 1,744 with 26–50, 721 with 51–100 and 275 with more than 100 — total 7,047 schools, some 3,020 short of the 10,067 the size bands describe. The gap is close to the size of the “fewer than 10 teachers” category itself.
The plan
Under the concept paper prepared by the Ministry, the government intends to provide a primary school for every child within a three-kilometre radius of their home. Every education zone is to have a primary school, or a secondary school with a strong primary section and full facilities.
Schools selected for development under that category will be assessed on eight factors, including Grade 1 admissions over the past three years, admission requests for the current year, the capacity to absorb students from nearby schools, the number of children under five in the area, and existing infrastructure.
Not reported
The Daily Mirror does not say how many schools face closure or merger, over what period, or what becomes of the 10,324 teachers attached to the smallest schools. Nor does it give a date for the restructuring, or say whether the Ministry has published the statistics itself.
