initiatives

technologically savvy and able to leverage these conditions to enhance student learning. in either case, Sri Lanka’s teacher management system will have to pay close attention to the unique needs of teachers and students in rural and urban areas. These needs may require more nuanced training or different induction programs for teachers in rural schools and urban schools. They also may require some innovative thinking to fill teacher shortages in certain subjects. For example, in Sri Lanka where there is a significant shortage of english teachers, teachers may have to be recruited from overseas to fill vacancies (Dundar et al. 2017). ultimately, Sri Lanka will have to explore innovative options to ensure that children in rural, urban, and estate schools have equal access to high-quality teachers.

A review of the teacher management system to ensure that it can attract, motivate, and retain high-quality teachers would be useful. Teacher motivation is a critical ingredient of teacher quality, and the best way to improve motivation may be to attract highly capable, motivated people to the teaching profession. in high-performing systems in countries such as Finland, Japan, and Singapore, teaching is a sought-after profession because teachers are highly respected and well paid (Lim et al. 2009). in the long run, improving teacher salaries may be a means of attracting better candidates into the teaching profession, but it is not a short-term solution (World Bank 2018). Accountability mechanisms, such as financial incentives for successful teachers and job termination of low-performing teachers, are other means of motivating teachers. However, given the vast and complex interaction of variables in an educational system, such mechanisms must be deployed with caution. Financial incentives based on student performance have had mixed results. in india and kenya, financial incentive programs did seem to improve student achievement (Duflo, Hanna, and Ryan 2012; Glewwe, ilias, and kremer 2010), but in several states in the united States financial incentives seemed to have no impact on test scores (Fryer 2013; Glazerman, Mckie, and Carey 2009; Springer et al. 2010). Although there is no single paradigm for recruiting and retaining motivated teachers, the best-performing educational systems have a coherent system in place that covers all aspects of a teacher’s career cycle (see table 4.4). This can help ensure that teachers are highly motivated because they are well respected, well selected, well compensated, and well supported (World Bank 2018). Sri Lanka should review its teacher management system to ensure that it can attract and retain highly motivated teachers.

ENHANCING LEARNING OUTCOMES THROUGH TECHNOLOGY-BASED INITIATIVES

With the rise of iCT in every corner of twenty-first-century life, governments have scrambled to ensure that iCT is appropriately integrated and utilized to support learning and prepare students for the twenty-first-century workplace. in keeping with these trends, in recent years Sri Lanka has taken steps to integrate iCT into the teaching-learning processes. To that end, the government has been gradually upgrading the iCT infrastructure across schools in Sri Lanka.

About 50 percent of Sri Lanka’s schools (approximately 4,500 schools) have received iCT infrastructure (ADB 2017)). The government has also launched initiatives such as Schoolnet, a web portal connecting about 1,500 schools (15 percent of all schools) islandwide (ADB 2017). The Moe recently launched