The Office for National Education Standards and Quality Assessment (Onesqa) has defended its quality assessments of educational institutions, saying they do not curb the amount of time teachers spend in the classroom.
Onesqa director Channarong Pornrungroj said in fact the assessments help teachers' development and students to improve academically.
Mr Channarong yesterday went before the media to react to the findings of a recent study of the Quality Learning Foundation (QLF).
The study found most Thai teachers spend 84 days of the 200 school days in a year, or 42%, on activities outside the classroom, and that spending too much time on such activities did not help students improve academically.
The most time-consuming activity outside the classroom was external evaluation of academic performance and standards from various organisations, which took 43 days. Of them, according to the findings, teachers spent nine days a year on the Onesqa assessment and the majority of them considered it a key issue affecting learning and teaching at schools.
However, Mr Channarong claimed Onesqa actually took only three days to complete its external quality evaluations conducted every five years in all educational institutions nationwide.
Mr Channarong said he wondered how the QLF obtained its information that teachers spent nine days a year on the Onesqa assessment, saying there must be some misunderstandings in the study and its methodology.
"Our assessments take no more than three days every five years or only five hours per year on average from teachers in basic schools and vocational institutions. In universities, the evaluations take only a day for each faculty. This study has caused misunderstandings among the public, leading to requests to abolish the Onesqa assessments," he said.
Educational institutions to be assessed by Onesqa are informed at least two weeks in advance so they can prepare themselves, Mr Channarong said.
He said he had heard some teachers say the Onesqa assessments provide nothing to improve the educational system except for putting a greater burdens on teachers, and consuming a huge chunk of the state budget.
"We have standards to certify quality, so the external quality assessment should be kept in place to ensure academic standards for the public, especially during this period when new satellite campuses are mushrooming everywhere," he said.