Educational inequity in the context of family: a micro study of type 2 school students in Jaffna division

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.