September 19, 2006

Success at a price

Private sector cash is proving vital in implementing the government’s much-vaunted Lab School scheme

ORATIP NIMKANNON

Vice Ministry for Education Piyabutr Cholvijarn presides over a scholarship presentation ceremony at Banpu's head office on August 31.

The Ministry of Education’s Lab School project has enjoyed mixed press since its launch in 2003. While the attempt to bring quality education to rural areas has been welcomed, announcements that the project will be completed within three years have been criticised as unrealistic.

The Lab School project earmarked 921 schools, one nominated by each district around the country, and committed to turning them into successful, state-of-the-art institutions. At the end of the three-year programme, in addition to being equipped with the latest technological resources, the schools’ overall performance is expected to have improved dramatically. By doing so, communities would have a school to be proud of and students in rural areas would no longer be forced to pack up and head to Bangkok in search of quality education.

By the end of 2006, the government expects all of these 921 schools to meet Lab School standards. “We use the students’ performance as the main evaluation criteria because it reflects the way teachers teach and how administrators manage the school,” says Vice Minister for Education Piyabutr Cholvijarn. “The results tell us about the school’s operating processes and the input that the administrators have on the management of the school itself.”

The project basically evaluates the schools based on four major criteria: quality of students, teaching approach, learning and development, and budget and resources management.

Staying in the game

Given three years to turn their schools around, the project has weighed heavily on many school administrators. By the end of 2005, 90 percent of the proposed Lab Schools had reported debts of at least one million baht, with most of the money having been spent on computers equipment.

“The [government] budget of 2.5 billion baht was not enough,” Piyabutr admits. “In the beginning, these schools had to start from scratch. They had nothing; not a functioning computer, a sink in the science lab, or even books in the library.”

Faced with such a huge task, individual schools’ ability to draw funds from the private sector, as encouraged by the government, has been crucial. In return for sponsoring Lab Schools, private companies are offered tax incentives.

Sopprab Pittayakom School in Lampang province, for example, have benefited from a successful partnership with energy giant Banpu Public Co Ltd. The additional funds injected into Sopprab have allowed it to invest in computer equipment and carry out much needed repairs.

“In 2004, we received additional funding of about 500,000 baht from Banpu,” says Prayuth Ritchitpian, director of Sopprab Pittayakom School. “To millionaires, this amount may be tiny. But to Sopprab, it is enormous and has helped get us started on the ICT [Information and Communication Technology] development project.”

In the first year of the partnership, Sopprab spent most of the funding on acquiring computers, setting basic IT infrastructure, building an e-library, and hiring native English speakers to teach English to students.

During the second year, Banpu’s additional funding of nearly 500,000 baht allowed Sopprab to expand the e-library and share its computer lab with five other schools in the district.

This year, the third year of the partnership, the school has allocated Banpu’s 532,300 baht donation for staff training in ICT.

“We emphasise both the continuity and sustainability of each school’s development project,” says Chanin Vongkusolkit, Banpu’s chief executive officer, of the company’s approach to the partnership. “The key concept is to create a collaborative atmosphere, rather than us merely providing the funding,” he adds.

This year, Banpu is providing more than two million baht to support a total of five schools in the northern provinces of Lampang, Lamphun, and Phayao. The schools are all located near the company’s mining facilities. Sopprab has, to some extent, been lucky. It’s proximity to industrial heavyweights such as Banpu has afforded opportunities schools in more remote areas struggle to match.

Measuring success

According to Piyabutr, teacher training has been flagged as this year’s key area of development for the Lab Schools. He says that with the right tools and materials, teachers can enhance students’ learning by encouraging them to be proactive in seeking out information, sharing what they have learned, and investigating theories.

“ICT is merely a tool,” he says. “The crucial elements in providing quality education are teaching methods, teaching materials, and learning resources.”

“Today, although we have met the general standard of teaching and learning, we haven’t reached the standard required by top schools. We must continue to support the project, particularly in the training of teachers and [development of] learning materials, so that students will be given a chance to realise their full academic potential”

The success of the programme, Piyabutr adds, can be measured in four key areas: the number of student enrolments in each school, the number of students who continue their education beyond the required nine years of school, the ability of students to extend and apply their classroom knowledge to real life, and the change in teachers’ roles from lecturers to facilitators.

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