National Schools in Sri Lanka — All 396, by District

A national school is not a bigger school or a better one. It is a school the Ministry of Education administers directly — it appoints the principal and the teachers, and it funds the school from the central budget. Every other government school is a provincialschool, run by its Provincial Council’s Department of Education under the 13th Amendment. Schools move into the national list by gazette, which is why the list changes occasionally rather than annually.

This is a directory, not a calculator, so its accuracy is entirely a question of whether the Ministry’s list was transcribed correctly. That procedure is therefore the methodology, and it is written out in the data module as well as here.

1. Extract. The Ministry publishes the list as a PDF with seven columns: sequence number, census number, school name, school address, province, district and zone. Running pdftotext -layout over it on 2026-09-24 produced 396 data rows. Three rows carry an address the PDF wrapped onto the previous line; those were rejoined to their row.
2. Normalise case, and nothing else. The PDF prints names in capitals. They are title-cased here for reading, with two rules that keep Sri Lankan naming intact: a one-letter run stays upper, so M.M.V., B.V. and D.S.Senanayake survive; and a one-letter run straight after an apostrophe goes lower, so St. Paul’s does not become St. Paul’S. Because only case changes, the published capitals can be reconstructed from any row, which keeps the transcription checkable. Source typos are kept, not corrected — census 00114 really is published as “Mount Lavinia Scienge College”.
3. Keep the Ministry’s codes. Province and district are published with their official numeric prefixes — 1.Western, 11.Colombo. The prefix is kept as the record’s district code, so a district is identified by a number rather than by a spelling, and results can be ordered the way the Ministry orders them.
4. Filter by set intersection. A school is shown when it satisfies the province and the district and the zone and the search text. Geography is always picked from the published list rather than typed, so a typo cannot produce a wrong answer, and an unrecognised filter matches nothing rather than being quietly dropped.
5. Search in two tiers. The first tier lower-cases and strips punctuation, so st marys finds St. Mary’s. Only if that finds nothing does the second tier run, folding the romanisation differences that genuinely occur in Sri Lankan school names — h dropped, w read as v, y read as i, doubled letters collapsed — which is what turns darmaraja into Dharmaraja and roial college into Royal College. The page says when it has fallen back, so a loose match is never passed off as an exact one.
6. Never infer. The list has no column for medium of instruction, gender, school type, student count or telephone number, so this tool publishes none of them. What it does publish about school types is the taxonomy and the national totals from the School Census — not a type against a named school, because no official source puts one there.

The counts are then checked against a different Ministry publication. The Annual School Census of Sri Lanka 2023 counts the same schools independently: its summary table gives 396 national schools out of 10,096 government schools, and its district table prints a national-school count for each of the 25 districts. All 25 of those figures match the subtotals counted from the list here. The census also reports 830,021 students and 43,300 teaching staff in national schools, and 26,794 Grade 1 admissions into them in the census year.

Every figure below is recomputed from the 396 records each time this page renders, and compared with the totals frozen when the PDF was transcribed. If a future edit moves a count, this table shows it rather than the page shipping a quiet error.

Counted from the Ministry’s list, largest first. Each figure also matches the Annual School Census 2023 district table.

By province

The Ministry classifies every government school by the highest classes it runs. The definitions below are the School Census’s own wording. The national-school column is from census table 6, which splits each type into its national and provincial halves — so 362 + 33 + 1 + 0 = 396, the same total as the list.

What that table says in one line: 362 of the 396 national schools run the Science A/L stream, so a national school very probably does — but 33are 1C and one is Type 2, so it is not automatic. This tool does not label an individual school with a type, because the Ministry’s national-school list has no type column and the census publishes type counts by district rather than against named schools. Guessing one would be inventing a fact about a real school.

• Ministry of Education — List of National Schools (the primary source for every school on this page)
• Ministry of Education, Data Management Branch — national school list (second Ministry copy, used to cross-check names and census numbers)
• Ministry of Education / Department of Census and Statistics — Annual School Census of Sri Lanka 2023, Summary Report (national totals, the by-district check, and the school-type definitions)
• Ministry of Education of Sri Lanka — official site
• Ministry of Education — Grade 6 national school admission application portal

The 396 rows on this page were transcribed from the Ministry PDF on 2026-09-24 and every district subtotal checked against the School Census the same day. Schools are added to the national list by gazette, so the count is correct as at that date. 93 education zones are represented. This page is scheduled for a full re-check by 2027-03-24.

Choosing a school for Grade 6? The Grade 5 Scholarship cut-off marks checker tells you the mark each national school took last year, and the Grade 1 admission age calculator covers entry at the other end. After O/Ls, the A/L stream eligibility checker works out which streams your results open up.