Recent statistics show that only 91,645 (2.2%) students of the 4,061,653 students in government schools’ study in a medium categorised as bilingual which includes the English medium. There are only 33 schools that teach all three major languages. These statistics were made available in the School Census report of 2019 released recently.
The medium categorised as bilingual includes Sinhala- English and Tamil-English.
There are 542 Sinhala-English schools and 168 Tamil-English schools.
This is in contrast to the 24.1% of students in Private schools’ that study in the Bilingual/English medium. The majority of students in private schools are in the Western Province.
In government schools, the majority of (3.2 million) children study in Provincial schools. National schools make up 798,372 students.
There are 62,467 male teachers and 184,125 female teachers in service. Of these 119,323 are Graduate Teachers, 120,848 are Trained Teachers 4,759 are Trainee Teachers, 1,518 are Untrained Teachers, and 144 are other teachers.
The highest proportion of national schools are in the Southern Province followed by the Western province. 4% of schools are national schools. There are 373 National schools and 9792 provincial schools.
The majority of students (41.5%) are in schools that have Grades 1-13. 16.1% of students are in schools that have Grades 1-5, 18.7% in schools that have Grades 1-11, and 23.1% in schools that have Grades 6-13.
Most schools are open to male and female students with only 385 being open to only one gender.
The majority of schools (42.3%) have 10-25 teachers. Schools with less than 10 teachers make up 29.9% of schools.
The majority of students (43.3%) at A level are in the Arts stream. 10.8% of students are in bioscience, 20.1% in commerce, and 7.3% in engineering and technology.
