This book examines skills demand and supply in Sri Lanka, and offers insightful analysis of the education and training system, and its responsiveness to changes in demand for skills. The book also provides suggestions on how the skills development system can be improved to better achieve Sri Lanka s development goals.

A country’s education system plays a pivotal role in promoting economic growth and shared prosperity. Sri Lanka has enjoyed high school-attainment and enrollment rates for several decades. However, it still faces major challenges in the education sector, and these challenges undermine the country’s inclusivegrowth goal and its ambition to become a competitive upper-middle-income country. The authors of Sri Lanka Education Sector Assessment: Achievements, Challenges, and Policy Options offer a thorough review of Sri Lanka’s education sector—from early childhood education through higher education. With this book, they attempt to answer three questions: • How is Sri Lanka’s education system performing, especially with respect to participation rates, learning outcomes, and labor market outcomes? • How can the country address the challenges at each stage of the education process, taking into account both country and international experience and also best practices? • Which policy actions should Sri Lanka make a priority for the short and medium term? The authors identify the most critical constraints on performance and present strategic priorities and policy options to address them. To attain inclusive growth and become globally competitive, Sri Lanka needs to embark on integrated reforms across all levels of education. These reforms must address both short-term skill shortages and long-term productivity. As Sri Lanka moves up the development ladder, the priorities of primary, secondary, and postsecondary education must be aligned to meet the increasingly complex education and skill requirements.

Empowered Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka’s development policy document, envisions reorienting the country toward a modern and high-value-adding economy that is able to compete in the global market. Expanding the middle class and improving the living standards by creating one million jobs are at the core of the policy. This report seeks to support the realization of that vision by analyzing Sri Lanka’s employment situation and drawing recommendations from the analysis. The report starts with an overview of the labor market in relation to both supply and demand. It then looks at the issues of aging and skills generation. The concluding chapter examines links between labor market trends, informality, and poverty. This study is a co-publication of the Asian Development Bank and the International Labour Organization.

Since the late 1970s, Sri Lanka has undergone a socio-economic transformation, from protectionism towards economic liberalisation and increasing integration into the world economy. Through a systematic comparison of these periods of economic change (1956–1977, and 1977 to the present), Angela W. Little and Siri T. Hettige examine the impact of this transformation on education, youth employment and equality of opportunity in Sri Lanka. The book charts Sri Lanka’s shift from a predominantly agricultural economy to one dominated by services and manufacturing, a reduction in unemployment, rising educational and occupational levels, expectations and achievements, and a reduction in poverty. In turn, it reveals a growing role for the private sector and foreign interests in post-secondary education and a modest growth in private education at the primary and secondary levels, as well as widening social disparities in access to qualifications, training and skills. The Sri Lankan experience of, and engagement with, globalisation has been tempered by a long-running ethnic conflict that hindered economic and social development and diverted considerable public funds into defence and war. Now that the war is ‘won’, the challenge is how to invest in human resource development and the fulfilment of the expectations of youth from all ethnic and social groups. This challenge requires serious policy analysis, the generation of more state revenues, the reallocation of existing public resources, and a political commitment to the winning of a sustainable peace and stability. This book makes an important contribution to the broader international literature on the implications of globalisation for education policy and practice, and to the interaction of exogenous and endogenous forces for educational change. It deals with the tension between the high social demand for education and the growing demand for specialised skills in a changing economy. As such, it has a wide interdisciplinary appeal across education policy and politics, Asian education, South Asian society, youth policy, sociology of education, political economy of social change, and globalisation.

This publication is part of a series of six country reports on technical and vocational education and training (TVET) and higher education in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. Each report presents current arrangements and initiatives in the respective country's skills development strategies. These are complemented by critical analyses to determine key issues, challenges, and opportunities for innovative strategies toward global competitiveness, increased productivity, and inclusive growth. The emphasis is to make skills training more relevant, efficient, and responsive to emerging domestic and international labor markets. The reports were finalized in 2013 under the Australian AID-supported Phase 1 of Subproject 11 (Innovative Strategies for Accelerated Human Resource Development) of Regional Technical Assistance 6337 (Development Partnership Program for South Asia).