What this examination is
The full official name of this examination is the “Competitive Examination for the Recruitment of Graduates in the Public Service to the Sri Lanka Teachers’ Service,” and it is the route through which graduates enter teaching posts in Sri Lanka’s public school system as members of the Sri Lanka Teachers’ Service. It is run by the Ministry of Education working together with the provincial Departments of Education, since school teacher vacancies span both nationally administered schools and schools run under provincial councils. Passing this examination is how a graduate is formally recruited into a public teaching post rather than a private or ad hoc teaching arrangement.
Who conducts it and who can apply
The Ministry of Education frames the recruitment, sets the vacancy list across subjects and mediums, and publishes the notification for each cycle jointly with the relevant provincial Departments of Education. Because this is graduate recruitment, as the exam’s own name states, the basic eligibility requirement is a Bachelor’s degree. Exact subject requirements, and how a degree subject maps onto a teaching subject vacancy, are set out in the notification for each individual cycle rather than fixed permanently, so a candidate should check the current notification for the subjects and mediums actually being recruited for before assuming their own degree qualifies.
A defining structural feature of this exam is that it runs in separate Sinhala, Tamil and English medium streams. Rather than one shared paper with a language choice, the recruitment is organised into medium-specific streams from the outset, covering vacancies in both national schools and provincial schools. This reflects how Sri Lanka’s public school system itself is organised: a school teaches through a specific medium, so the recruitment that staffs it is medium-specific from the start rather than medium-neutral with a late-stage choice.
The stage-by-stage pattern
Recruitment runs as a written examination followed by an interview, with the interview being the final stage before appointment. As with the medium streams, the detailed subject-by-subject structure of the written papers, along with marks and duration, is set out in the notification issued for each individual recruitment cycle, since the subjects and vacancies being recruited for change from one cycle to the next.
Scale: what is and is not on record
Neither a total applicant figure nor a total vacancy figure for a recent cycle of this examination is published in the sources available for this page, so neither number is stated here. What is confirmed and sourced is the timeline of the most recently documented cycle: the 2023 round.
How to apply and the 2023 cycle dates
For the 2023 cycle, the gazette notice was published on 27 January 2023 and applications closed on 10 February 2023, covering Sinhala, Tamil and English medium teacher vacancies in both national and provincial schools. Applications are submitted through the process the Ministry of Education sets out in its notification for each cycle; that notification also carries the current fee, required documents and the subject-wise vacancy breakdown for the round. Because the vacancy list, mediums recruited for and dates all change between cycles, this page’s schedule entries carry their own source and the date they were last checked, and any figure that is not published in a confirmed source, including applicant and vacancy totals, is left out rather than estimated.