FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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Thai education reforms slammed as ‘expensive and damaging failure’

Thai education reforms slammed as ‘expensive and damaging failure’

SIXTEEN YEARS of failure to reform the country's education system have caused Bt1.5 trillion in lost opportunities, Thailand Future Foundation executive chairman Sethaput Suthiwartnarueput said yesterday.

Talking at the Thailand Strategic Giving event in Bangkok, Sethaput said education reform since 1999 had failed repeatedly, causing damage equivalent to 11 per cent of the country’s GDP, based on calculations in comparison to countries that had succeeded with reform.
For example, he said education reforms in Poland succeeded in 11 years, enabling pupils to obtain a 48-mark increase in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) testing, while over the same period Thai students only scored three marks higher.
Sethaput cited other studies to paint a problematic picture of Thai education with unresolved issues at all levels; one fifth of Thai pre-school children had a substandard child development rate; 140,000 primary pupils couldn't read and 200,000 couldn't write, while 32 per cent of secondary students couldn't grasp the key message from a reading passage in the PISA.
Most schools with high-score students in the Ordinary National Educational Test (O-Net) were in Bangkok, while tutoring school expenses were 1.3 times higher than normal schooling, he said.
Despite there being many universities in Thailand, two-thirds of households couldn't afford to send their children for higher education, he said. It cost Bt500,000 to complete a four-year undergraduate programme, while the Student Loan Fund could lend around Bt170,000 to each student.
Although one per cent of new graduates were unemployed six months after graduation, one quarter could land jobs that matched their fields of study, while the rest got positions in other fields or under-qualified ones.
"Budget isn’t a problem, as the government allocated plenty. Our initial study found it was more on the management, curriculum and teacher quality – the latter of which is a key matter that, if remained unsolved, attempts to sort other areas wouldn't help much," said Sethaput.
He said current efforts in teacher development were hampered by the bureaucratic system's focus on indicators such as teacher training percentage rather than the students' quality.
Former prime minister Anand Panyarachun, who gave a speech on how donations can create changes in Thai society, said financial contributions such as scholarships should be continuous to allow more young people from poor backgrounds to access good-quality education and narrow the social gap.
He said Thai society should invest in education for the future of its children.
 

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