Abstract:
Human-environment interaction is one of the main topics in every decision that has
been taken under the concept of sustainable development. Understanding spatial
patterns is one good way of proper decision making when considering the spatial
sciences. When it comes to schooling, spatial concepts like population distribution,
school density, school distribution, accessibility are commonly used. In the primary and
secondary education sector, there is a vast competition in order to get into high standard
schools, mainly national or provincial level schools in Sri Lanka. But most of these
schools are limited to core areas of the cities based on accessibility and population
density. Relief, land cover, land use, climate, drainage, slope and many other factors
are effecting on this unequal distribution of both population and service centres like
schools. The main objective of the study is to identify the spatial distribution of
secondary schools with population gravity. The study mainly depends on secondary
data of population by DSDs and the list of secondary schools in the Kalutara district
obtained from the Department of Census and Statistics and the Department of
Education respectively. Methods of statistical analysis like central tendency, measures
of dispersion are commonly used and spatial analysis tools in Arc GIS is used as a tool.
To clearly understand the spatial distribution of schools, it is again segmented as
National and provincial level. According to thiessen polygon analysis, it indicates the
tolerant boundary of each school in order to depict the coverage. Normal population
distribution as well as generalised population density based on DSDs indicate areas of
high accumulation of population, and population gravity shows the gravity centre of the
population in the Kalutara district based on population between age 05-19 considered
as the age of schooling. Then the spatial distribution of schools and population gravity
by age of 05 to 19 was compared to understand the relationship between these two
variables. It is clear in the study that there is an unequal distribution of National and
Provincial level schools in the Kalutara district based on population distribution and
population gravity.
