Sri Lanka

Additional education reforms include improved teacher education programs of study. There are 12,000 untrained teachers in the educational system. A distancelearning program is in place with 9,625 teachers enrolled. The remaining untrained teachers will be sent to teachers' colleges. The government has set the year 2002 as a deadline for achieving a completely trained teaching faculty. There will be no further recruitment of untrained teachers. The National Colleges of Education have been designated to train all new teachers. There will be 84 Teacher Centers, 72 of which had been established by 1999 with money provided by the World Bank under the Teacher Education and Teacher Deployment Project. Renewal courses, as part of teacher in-service training, were extended to 30,704 educators.