A school cannot be better than the people prepared to lead it. Parliament is now examining an uncomfortable problem in Sri Lanka’s education system: experienced teachers can actually be financially disadvantaged by becoming principals.
There are promotions people spend careers trying to achieve. Becoming the principal of a school ought to be one of them.
Yet Sri Lanka appears to have created a peculiar situation in which some experienced teachers may have good reason to think twice before accepting the responsibility of running a school.
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The issue has now reached Parliament.
The Sectoral Oversight Committee on Education, Manpower and Human Capital has decided to appoint a special subcommittee to examine problems surrounding the Teachers’ Service and Principals’ Service, including salary disparities that can discourage teachers from entering the principals’ ranks.
That deserves considerably more attention than an argument about salary scales.
A principal is not simply the most senior teacher in a school. The job carries responsibility for staff, pupils, discipline, administration, finances, examinations, parents, buildings and, increasingly, compliance with an expanding range of government requirements.
In many schools, the principal is effectively the chief executive of a substantial public institution.
The obvious assumption would therefore be that moving from teaching into school leadership brings both greater responsibility and a correspondingly clear financial progression.
If that relationship has become distorted, the problem is not merely unfair to the individual teacher. It creates precisely the wrong incentive for the education system.
Why should an experienced teacher with a secure position volunteer for substantially greater administrative responsibility if the financial reward is inadequate, uncertain or compromised by anomalies between the two services?
That question becomes more serious when viewed across thousands of schools.
Sri Lanka can build classrooms, distribute textbooks, change syllabuses and introduce education reforms. None of those measures eliminates the need for capable leadership inside the school itself.
A weak incentive to enter the Principals’ Service therefore risks becoming a weak pipeline of future school leaders.
There is another difficulty.
The best classroom teacher does not automatically become the best principal. School leadership requires management, financial literacy, conflict resolution, administration and the ability to lead other professionals.
Sri Lanka therefore needs not simply enough applicants for principal positions, but enough good applicants.
That makes the incentives particularly important.
The parliamentary inquiry should establish how widespread the reluctance actually is, how many principal vacancies exist, whether qualified teachers are declining appointments and precisely what happens to salary, allowances and career progression when a teacher crosses into the Principals’ Service.
It should also ask whether the system is losing precisely the people it should be trying hardest to attract.
Education debates in Sri Lanka frequently revolve around examinations, university admissions, teacher shortages and curriculum reform.
Leadership receives rather less attention.
Yet every parent understands the difference a strong principal can make to a school. The culture can change. Teachers can perform differently. Discipline can improve. Resources can be managed better. Expectations can rise.
The reverse is equally true.
Parliament is right to examine the problem. But another committee will achieve little unless the anomalies it identifies are actually corrected.
Sri Lanka has spent years asking how to improve its schools.
Perhaps one place to begin is remarkably simple.
Make sure that becoming responsible for an entire school does not leave a good teacher wondering whether accepting the promotion was a mistake.
