A New Scheme of School Clustering for Better Management: A Study on Grade V Scholarship Examination Results in Gampaha District

Abstract

Educational management is some kind of complex human enterprise in order to achieve and to accomplish the expected goals by bringing different resources together. School management, as a fundamental of educational management, consists number of principles relating to the technique of classroom procedure and the practice of successful teachers. Hence most of the developed countries tend to use concept called “Clustering schools”. In Sri Lanka, government schools are classified into four types namely type 1AB, type 1C, type 2 and type 3 based on streams of advanced classes and not based on the academic performance of students. This study is based on the students’ performance using Grade-v scholarship examination results in year 2013 and 2014. This proposed classification method can be used to find out best schools, lower performance schools as well as moderate schools in the particular area. By identifying school performance, it may be helpful to authorized people in education in order to introduce new methods to improve the academic performance of schools. Therefore they can manage and update proper educational system for upcoming years. Schools in Gampaha district were selected as a sample which contains four zones namely Minuwangoda, Kelaniya, Gampaha and Negombo. Cluster analysis was carried out in each zone separately under criteria namely boys/mixed schools, girls/mixed schools and mixed schools. The application of hierarchical method (wards method, single linkage, average linkage and complete linkage) was used for clustering and three clusters were defined in each method. According to the result, same set of schools in Gampaha, Kelaniya, Negombo and Minuwangoda zone were identified as best schools and low performance schools in both years. However, some of the schools that belong to the Moderate group were moved to the Best and Low performance groups in two years.