Organizational Challenges in Managing Schools: Experiences of Government Schools in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The Ministry of Education in Sri Lanka (MoESL) expects to decentralize decision making power and responsibility to schools through School Based Management (SBM). This study is a qualitative case study, and thirty School Development Committee members (SDC) were purposively selected from the Colombo District government schools. The data gathered through interviews and document survey was analyzed by using thematic analysis. Since the schools make many efforts, it was revealed that the majority of schools face a big problem in enhancing the performance of the students. It appeared that the key intention of the stakeholders is to improve the performance at the national examinations. Hence, the majority of them overlook the total development of the students. Lack of training and awareness of SDC members hinder the development of schools. Limited time of staff members is a fact that hampers the effective implementation of managerial and school developmental activities of almost all the schools. The lack of human and physical resources is a key problem in which all of them faced in developing their schools. It was observed that some schools perform very well, even though; they have many obstacles and problems. It seems that intellectual contribution of the instructional leaders is very less in developing their schools. It was noticed that the attention of education authorities on supervision, monitoring, training, and development of managers and leaders at the school level was not adequate. The majority of principals and school leaders expect more power and authority for decision making on human and other resources. It was noticed that there is a big need to have a proper monitoring and supervision mechanism for handling big issues at school level since some stakeholders of schools are very abandoned, thus, they face big problems in managing their schools.