The Office of the Basic Education Commission (Obec) has renamed its scheme which allows state schools to raise funds from the private sector and design their own curriculum from "public school" to "partnership school" to avoid confusion.
Deputy Education Minister Udom Kachinthorn, who oversees the project, said the "partnership school" policy aims to increase the role of local private sector businesses in education by allowing them to be members of the management committees of their partner schools.
Dr Udom said partnership schools will have greater independence than normal state schools. The boards of the schools will comprise members of the private, civil and university sectors.
Partnership schools, by status, are still state schools and receive government subsidies, however they can raise funds from the private sector. They can also design curriculas based on the central curriculum to match their own context, he said.
Moreover, the board of a partnership school could also manage its own recruitment and even pay higher wages to teaching staff than state schools, he said.
"The use of the term 'public school' was in itself confusing because a public school is a state school, so we changed the name to avoid confusion," Dr Udom said.
He explained that partnership schools are also different from schools in the "Pracharath school" project, an initiative set up earlier by the Education Ministry, which only receive support from the private sector, as they allow the private sector to manage them as well.
Dr Udom said Obec initially planned to set up just one partnership school per province in the first phase of the initiative, but it may revise this if more schools want to join the programme.
Dr Udom said schools can apply to join the initiative through Obec.
"Obec will choose the qualified ones. For example, executives, teachers, students and local communities must share the determination to pursue the partnership school concept," he said.
Obec will start operating the first batch of 77 partnership schools across the country from the first semester of the coming academic year.
According to Dr Udom, big private companies such as Mitrphol and Rama Foods have already taken part in the project.
Earlier, Athapol Anunthavorasakul, a lecturer at the Chulalongkorn University's Faculty of Education, warned the Education Ministry against rushing to implement the concept, saying it would widen the educational gap in the country.
He said the project might repeat the mistake of the United States as he suspected that partnership schools would be similar to charter schools in the US.
A charter school receives government funding but operates independently of the established state school system in which it is located.
"Charter schools have eventually become more like private schools and they can charge parents for services. In the end, their presence turns state schools into educational institutes for second-class citizens," Mr Athapol said.