Abstract:
Categorizing schools and tracking the students is one of the enduring issues in
present-day research on educational equity. Sri Lanka, with its long standing free
educational achievements and reforms suffers with structural inequality of family.
In this context this study objective is to identify and assessing the inequity factors
by analyzing the scenario of type 2 schools in Jaffna division. By mapping the
educational attainment gaps of these students, study aimed to find out the facts
for the research questions such as the nature of relationship between attainment
and parental education/occupation, physical facilities of home, home interactions
and self- esteem of the students and selection of schools. The study has been
planned as a cross sectional survey .Students from type 2 schools and the
advantaged schools of the same division were the population of the study. Data
was collected by using self-administrated questionnaire and were analyzed with
the help of SPSS. Equity indices have been developed based on human capital
and physical facilities available in students’ family. The results revealed that there
was a statistically significant difference (p<0.05) in equity index between
students of type 2 schools and other advantaged schools Results also clearly
reflect that a substantial majority of respondent’s parents are with poor
educational background and temporary nature of occupations. Lacking the basic
need such as separate space or study rooms at their homes; No assistance at home
related to education and has very low interactional engagements. In this context ,
the study anticipates that constructed equity indexes will facilitate as tools of the
core planning and monitoring of full-fledged implementation of consolidated
equity strategy and useful for specific intervention policy like socio economic
(SES) school integration.
