Sri Lanka Grade 2–11 School Admission Marks Calculator

Circular 09/2026, issued on 31 March 2026, governs admission into what the Ministry calls the intermediate grades. It replaced Circular 27/2025 after barely six months and, before that, 17/2023. It covers Grades 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 in government schools, and nothing else: Grade 1 runs under its own circular, Grade 5 is the Scholarship year, and Grade 6 intake comes out of the Grade 5 Scholarship Examination results. If you are applying for Grade 1, use the Grade 1 admission marks calculator instead; for a Grade 6 place, the Grade 5 Scholarship cut-off marks are what decide it.

Scoring runs in four steps. First, the scheme. Grades 2–4 scheme marks an application out of 50; Grades 7–11 scheme marks it out of 100, because it also scores the child's own school record.

Second, the eligibility gate.Five categories admit an application, and each carries a factual test that is fatal if it fails — high marks do not rescue an application posted under a category the family does not satisfy. A state officer's transfer must have moved the workstation 25 km or more; a return from abroad needs 12 months or more of work or study overseas; a relocation needs 50 km or more; all three must have happened within the last 3years. The fourth category asks that the child reached the district cut-off at the Grade 5 Scholarship Examination, and is open to Grades 7–11 only. The fifth, for children of people employed at a school, the Ministry or a state university, has no numeric test at all — the employer's service certificate settles it.

Third, distance. Up to 25 marks, in four bands:

• 10 km or less : 25 marks
• Over 10 km, up to 15 km : 20 marks
• Over 15 km, up to 20 km : 15 marks
• Over 20 km : 5 marks

The distance is measured from the permanent residence, or from a transferred officer's new workstation. The published band labels (“under 10 km”, “10–15 km”) do not settle which band an exact 10.0, 15.0 or 20.0 km falls into. This tool reads each band as inclusive of its upper edge — the applicant-favourable reading — and says so on screen whenever your distance lands exactly on a boundary, so you know the mark could legitimately be the lower one. Two independent routines walk the band table from opposite ends and must agree on every distance from 0 to 200 km before a mark is shown; the page reports that cross-check alongside the result, the way the tax calculator cites the IRD's monthly formula against its own bracket walk.

Fourth, the child's record — Grades 7–11 only. The final term average converts to up to 15 marks, the best achievement in sport, aesthetics or innovation to up to 25 by the level it was won at (school, zonal, provincial, national, international), and a leadership role — class monitor, team captain, prefect, head prefect — to up to 10. Those three maximums are confirmed; the steps inside them are this site's model, and are labelled as such in the breakdown.

The remaining 25 marks belong to the category itself, and the split between the five categories is the one thing no accessible source publishes. The calculator therefore reports a range rather than a single total, and treats the category as a pass/fail gate with its own document checklist. Read the totals with the real constraint in mind: vacancies, not marks, decide admission. Classes cap at 40 for Grades 2–5 and 45 for Grades 6–11, per parallel class, and a full class has no vacancy at any score. To draw up a shortlist before the vacancy list appears, the national school finder lists the schools in each district, and the zonal education office finder gives you the office to ask about a specific grade's vacancies.

A fourth case worth knowing: enter a distance of exactly 10 km and the tool awards 25 marks but flags the boundary, because “under 10 km” and “10–15 km” do not say which side an exact 10.0 sits on. Enter 0 km and it awards the full 25 while warning that a school and a home do not share an address — the interview board measures the road distance itself.

One application, one category. The board does not add marks across them, so pick the category your documents prove most cleanly.

Grades outside this circular: Grade 1 — Grade 1 admission runs under its own annual circular with a different 100-mark scheme. Grade 5 — Grade 5 is the Scholarship Examination year, so the circular does not move children into it. Grade 6 — Grade 6 places are filled from the Grade 5 Scholarship Examination results, not by this application.

• Ministry of Education — Circular 09/2026 (Grades 2–11 admission)The governing document: marks schedule, five categories, class caps, calendar and the prescribed application form. Download the Sinhala or Tamil PDF from this page.
• Ministry of Education — circulars indexCheck here first: if a circular later than 09/2026 has been issued, the marks on this page are superseded.
• Guruwaraya — Circular 09/2026 marks schedule and calendarIndependent transcription of the distance bands, the 50-mark junior total and the admission calendar.
• TeachMore — new guidelines for intermediate-grade admissions 2026Independent transcription of the five categories, the class caps and the Grades 7–11 component maxima (15 / 25 / 10).
• Siridhamma College — mid-intake notice under Circular 09/2026A school's own notice, confirming the 2026 transitional window: applications 6–27 April 2026, interviews 1–15 May 2026.
• Sunday Times — new circular on student admission, transfers, class sizesConfirms 09/2026 replaces Circular 27/2025 and who it is addressed to.

Last checked on 2026-09-26 against Circular 09/2026 (Ministry of Education, 31 March 2026) — admission of students from Grade 2 to Grade 11, excluding Grades 5 and 6. This circular is reissued roughly every year, so confirm at the Ministry's circulars index that nothing later than 09/2026 has been published before you rely on these marks. If you have the circular PDF in front of you and the category mark split or the achievement ladders differ from what is shown here, email me the page number — that correction goes in the same day.