Education Council set to play key role in upcoming reforms
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Will work with committee on education and human development policy that reports to PM
THE EDUCATION COUNCIL is set to play the important role of working alongside the upcoming Committee on Education and Human Development Policy to strengthen the country’s education foundation.
Reporting directly to the prime minister, the committee would have a big influence across various authorities if the charter draft being prepared by the Constitution Drafting Committee takes effect. “This committee will lay down policies while the Education Council will serve as its secretary,” the Council’s secretary general Prof Piniti Ratananukul said.
Piniti said the council would immediately recruit more researchers to ensure it had all the information required to achieve efficiency.
He believes the constitutionally-prescribed committee would be able to effectively facilitate efforts to improve education quality because its concepts and policies would not be limited to agencies under the Education Ministry’s supervision.
“In fact, there are many agencies involved in educational work,” he said.
To illustrate his point, he said the Agriculture Ministry had run the College of Irrigation and the Border Patrol Police Division had provided educational services to children.
Piniti believes the Educational Council’s works would be applied more usefully if it labours alongside the Committee on Education and Human Development Policy.
“For more than a decade now, we have developed educational plans for the country but no agency has really used them,” he lamented. “Most educational agencies have developed their own plans.”
According to Piniti, when agencies work their own way many problems can arise.
For example, he said the country had a labour shortage in some fields and there were many university graduates struggling to find jobs in certain fields.
Piniti believes the problems could have been prevented had the agencies taken into account information provided by the Education Council.
“We in fact have compiled figures and recommended how many engineers the country will need,” he said.
Piniti said Thailand must not lose sight of the overall picture and the integration of educational works to improve educational services, enhance its human resources and boost its competitiveness.
Piniti, head of a working panel on educational reform, revealed that it had been proposed that an educational master plan for the country should be valid for five years to ensure reform was neither a short- nor long-term approach.
“Today’s circumstances can change fast. So a five-year period should be perfect,” he said. “We have to accept that new technologies are coming up all the time.”
He said that when it came to producing quality teachers, a solid plan must be in place for at least the next 10 years. Quality teachers would play a big role in boosting educational quality and student quality.
Had the Ghurudhayada Teacher Preparation project not been scrapped due to political influence, the teacher-quality problem would not be as severe.
As such, he hoped a similar initiative would come into effect and be implemented long enough to ensure Thailand had an adequate number of quality teachers.
Such an initiative would offer scholarships to students who planned to join teacher-training institutes in the programme’s first year. The scholarships would come with the condition that the recipients must take up teaching jobs in their home provinces after graduation.
When asked how the country could improve the current teacher-training programme, Piniti said: “It’s up to the Thailand Education Deans Council to design.”
Piniti is optimistic the upcoming educational reform, which aims to deliver real efforts to improve teacher quality, will go ahead as planned.
“The new constitution will require the reform to continue without any interruption.”
He added that if it were proving difficult to force an agency to follow education policies, budgeting could be an effective tool.
“We can manage labour supply/demand with budget allocated for each field of study. For example, we won’t approve a budget for programmes in areas that have no labour demand. We will allocate funding to programmes that will provide labour for the market,” he said.
Piniti said that when working on education plans, relevant parties must take into account relevant factors such as how to provide the type of human resources the country needs.
“We need to develop an efficient and integrated system for this,” he said.
