Teacher Education in Sri Lanka

It is essential for any country to recruit the most capable individuals into the teaching profession, provide them with quality pre-service initial teacher education, use effective mechanisms for their deployment and ensure opportunities for them to upgrade their knowledge and skills continuously over the full length of their professional career. To attract the most able to the teaching profession and retain them in-service, the government has to take steps to improve the status and motivation of teachers through better salaries and working conditions, improved autonomy and responsibility and promising career pathways that contribute to the enhancement of their professionalism as well.

One of the significant steps that have been taken towards achieving this aim is that ‘establishment of Colleges of Education for pre--service teacher education in Sri Lanka by parliament act No.30 of 1986. This enabled capable young people who have passed G.C.E. A/L examination to be attracted to the teaching profession. The three year National Diploma in Teaching offered by the Colleges has two year institutional period and one year internship period’. (The Development of Education-National Report: 2004) Pre-service teacher education thus became an essential requirement in recruiting non graduate teachers to the system, and made redundant the 16 Teachers Colleges and the large scale Distance Education Programme of the National Institute of Education that provided initial teacher education to practicing teachers. ‘Recognizing the importance of Continuing Teacher Education, the same reforms also paved the way for the establishment of 100 Teacher Centres so that each educational zone of the country had at least one Teacher Centre. The purpose of this new initiative was to provide short term, non- residential continuing teacher education to upgrade teacher skills at least once in every seven years. Identifying the need for residential continuing teacher education of a longer duration, a decision was also made to retain some of the Teachers’ Colleges as Teacher Education Institutes’.(The Development of Education- National Report:2004)

The Institutional provision of teacher education in the past was expected to meet educational needs of the country by contributing to the academic, professional and personal growth of teachers and enhancing their professional status. ‘A National Authority on Teachers Education (N.A.T.E.) was established in 1997 to address this issue of uncoordinated development of teacher education’. (The Development of Education-National Report: 2004). The teacher education network of Sri Lanka today, consists of the National Institute of Education and four University Faculties/Departments of Education,(Faculties of Education at the University of Colombo and the Open University, Departments of Education at the University of Peradeniya and University of Jaffna),17 Colleges of Education, 4 Teacher Education Institutes,100 Teacher Centres and 30 Regional English Support Centres that had been there for sometimes to provide in-service continuing teacher education for English teachers of the system.