Why GIS is an Essential Tool to Manage the Schools Distribution Issues: Study based on Colombo District of Sri Lanka

Abstract

Even if there are a large number of schools established in Colombo District of Sri Lanka by government or other stakeholders, it is very difficult to find a school for the children, which is also a major burden issue faced by Sri Lankan parents. In Sri Lanka, however to overcome this issue, it is required to adopt spatially manageable location database of schools, which is found through different analyses in the literature in most of the other countries. School management system and its supervision have been controlled by the Education Zone (EZ) offices. Due to lack of applications of the Information Communication Technology (ICT) in the education management system in Sri Lanka, many problems can be identified in school management process. Especially there is a high potentiality to apply Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for education management and administration. Nowadays, popular schools gained more competition in the process of grade one student selection. Thus the schools use manual distance calculation system using with maps printed on papers because there is no common computerized system such as GIS. There is a contrastive difference between Colombo urban schools and schools in the outskirt of Colombo. Within the Colombo metropolitan area, the number of 1AB schools are higher than the other areas of the country and the outer core of Colombo. There are 36 national schools and totally 405 government schools are situated in the Colombo district. Moreover 16 out of 36 National schools are located in the Colombo metropolitan area. In the present study GIS operations and anlyses were carried out using Arc GIS 10.1 version. To perform GIS operations spatial data in 1:50,000 scale maps, which were obtained from the Survey Department of Sri Lanka were used. Most of the attribute data were obtained from the Ministry of Education, Department of Census and Statistics and also from the Central Bank of Sri Lanka. The study is devoted to discuss what factors have been contributed towards the variations in spatial distribution of schools in the Colombo district. Identifying the spatial variations of school distribution in the district, determining the school hinterland areas and population statuettes were among specific objectives of the study. Accordingly, we suggest that Sri Lankan school system can use the GIS for their selection process as well as other management matters, especially distance calculation within a specific proximity area. This study has analysed the school clusters by using spatial autocorrelation and multi-distance spatial cluster analysis (Ripley's K Function) tools. The study had proven that the schools in Colombo district are spatially distributed as clusters. Accordingly, the main finding is that, most of the school clusters (about 60 %) are located in the core areas of Colombo Metropolitan areas, where students have to day to day travel from their residences.