The broken promise of EFA in Thai education system : a critical analysis of the UNESCO Education For All programmes implementation in Thailand

11 min readMar 14, 2021

Since Jomtien Declaration on Education for All in 1990, Thailand adopted the education for all programmes and implemented to the national education system. In the World Education Forum 2000 in Dakar, Senegal, the global commitment was established among member states in the conference. Pursuant to the UNESCO’s Education for All framework, 6 goals were set for this programmes to be achieved by 2015 (UNESCO, 2015), which included :

Early childhood care and education
Universal primary education
Youth and adult skills
Adult literacy
Gender Equality
Quality of Education

With the 6 goals of EFA programme, The Royal Thai Government (RTG), led by the Ministry of Education implemented various programmes to reach each goal. Due to the decline of population, the human resource development is vital in present society as well as fostering the values of lifelong learning. By that means, Thai government put education as one of the national priority. The first part of this essay is about the general information regarding the EFA programme in Thailand as well as the progress of RTG in implementing the programme. It will be followed by the result of the implementation of those EFA projects and the analysis of indicators why and why not the EFA programme is success or failed in Thai case. The last part will be the suggestion based on the analysis as well as the personal experience in Thai Education system.

After the ratification of Jomtien declaration for Education for All, Thai government had come up with various measures to tackle the problems of inequality and inequity of Thai education system.

Looking into the first goal, early childhood care and education, Thai government done several actions responding to early childhood development to ensure that family and child have sufficient knowledge since before the child is born. The Ministry of Education (MOE) also emphasised the age-appropriate education to Thai children. The first thing the government did was establishing the National Committee on Early Childhood Development in 2003, which chaired by the Prime Minister.

The measures the RTG had taken in accordance with the first goal are long-term plan for early childhood care and development 2007–2016, monitoring and evaluation programme, and improving the early childhood care centre by setting standard. The Plan for early childhood development 2007–2016 aims to increase the pre-school education for Thai children.

The challenges for the first goal is the slow childhood development compared to other countries. There was lack of parent attention for children in early ages as well as the newborn due to the working hours and lack of perennial skills. Likewise, children is raised by teacher more than spend time with their parents.

By considering the second goal, Universal Primary Education, the government implemented several policies to ensure the equity and fairness of education provided in the country. In 1999, Thai government enacted the National Education Act B.E. 1999, which included the compulsory secondary education to all children and the rights for basic education is also mentioned in the 2007 constitution.

Persuasively, The Ministry of Education claims that they have been successful in implementing Goal 2 in providing opportunity for quality Education and successful in expanding its mission in providing basic education for people aged between 16–69 year old through the rights provided in law.

Yet there are challenges in regarding the ethnic minority and migrant children, which including non-documented children. According to the UN-Fund and NESDB report, rate of teen pregnancy in Thai teenage girls rises in recent year, which led to the drop out of girls. The economic inequality remains and posts significant effect on attending rate as seen from the table below.

For the third goal, youth and adult skills, government aims to tackle the literacy problem and life-long learning by emphasises on the local needs. It also pay attention to the non-formal education sector as well.

In the meantime, the education curriculum in Southern provinces of Thailand is developed in accordance with the cultural diversity to foster peace. And lastly, some attention had been paid to the curriculum for vocational education, which is believed to be mechanism for building manpower and contribute to economic development. Nevertheless, the issue of rapid change of skills that the society is needed and the priority for inclusive skill development remain challenges for the Goal 3.

Concerning the fourth goal, Adult literacy, government aimed to raise level of literacy in adult and youth in both non-formal and informal education to increase percentage of literacy of Thai people. It also created the second national plan for elderly education during 2002–2021.

With the challenge of losing the ability to read unless it is used regularly, the ministry of education promotes the Life Long Learning programme among Thai citizen aged between 15–59 year old as well as encourage education institution to conduct the literacy based programme. There is also the promotion of leisure reading through novel and smart home book.

From the charts, the first graph indicates the increasing literacy rate among Thai citizen until 2010 and the second chart shows the positive trend toward gender equity in literacy rates.

The government programmes targeted the disadvantaged, working age in formal and informal education, foreign workers who require language and law knowledge, and ageing population. To illustrate the forth goal, the government implemented the Community Learning Centre (CLC) project to encourage lifelong learning.

For the fifth goal, the government aimed to increase equality and gender equality in education through the Education Act, 1999.

Up to the present time, Thai government achieved more than 90% of gender equality and promotion of girl education, as illustrated in the Table 25 below. The gender equality in Thailand is not a government priority due to low rate of inequality. However, the women and girl development is not neglected in the government agenda.

And lastly, the sixth goal is the improvement in the quality of education. Thai government aimed to improve vocational education as well as the teacher preparation to raise quality. Learners should be able to think, analyse, solve problems, and learn independently and continually (MOE, 2014).

From time to time, education development has been in the government agenda and in the 11th National Economic and Social Development Plan 2012–2016. In spite of the progress, the flow of teacher and learning system need a long way to go. The student performance in ONET national test signified the need for further development of students’ knowledge. The vocational education also needed an expansion due to the need of labour market. The issue of teacher quality and quantity should also be emphasised as the small school in rural areas lack of teacher, which make those schools incomparable to the national standard, not to mentioned that a number of student still lack of ability to read and write Thai.

Under those circumstance, the Ministry of education took various measures to reform the learning system, including fostering the critical thinking and problem solving, and revising secondary curriculum.

Im provident are being emphasised in academic subjects for ONET or the Ordinary National Educational Test (MOE, 2014).

Although it may be true that the EFA programme contribute to better access to primary education as well as the literacy and gender equality in Thai education system, there are some aspect of Thai society mixed with Thai culture on education that hinder the development progress.

Giving the point of the migrant child, Thai government failed to include those children into the school system despite the law and cabinet resolution that allow free education for those kids. The estimation of out-of-school migrant children in Thailand is around 60% or 200,000 of them. Despite this failure of the government, Save the children conducted the project in Bang Khun Tien, Bangkok, where a high number of migrants children live in. The project aims to provide children with sufficient Thai language and encourage them to attend Thai school system. They also raised awareness for the rights of those children. As a result of this programme, the rate of migrant children attending school increase by 76% since 2009. However the challenges about the economic status on the drop-out rate still remains a major factors among migrant students in Thailand (Save The Children, 2015).

In reality, Thai society possess some culture values that hinder the EFA development. In this part, there will be various culture among Thai student that government failed to recognise during the EFA programme.

Firstly, the problem regarding the emphasise on the paper test, specifically the ONET test, and the GPA of student more than what skills they have. The government policy aims to increase ONET score because they believe that this test can tell the intelligence of student as well as the quality of Thai education. However, the content of the exam raised many question as ONET, which is the national test, often consists of mistake in question. Some scholars in Thai education field argue that the system of ONET, which is the multiple choices exam cannot measures student ability as 25% of their score could possibly come from guessing (Noonmun, 2016). Another problem is school tend to emphasise on ONET as it can be indicators for the school ranking in Thailand. Providing that the ONET exam cover all aspect of the subject learnt in school, the curriculum could not squeeze everything in the period of 6 years or 12 years of learning. Basically, schools teach the textbook, but the ONET exam test what is not included in the textbook.

With excessive emphasise on ONET test and GPA of student, the cram school, which is a major problems, yet neglected by the Government. In Thai education system, students tend to go to cram school or private tutors to enter famous school or university. The cram school can start from kindergarten until the high-school level. The system make those children who could not afford the tutoring become secondary in education society. Not to mention that teachers in some school become a private tutor by themselves due to their low salary. Another factor that keep the cram school growing is the education business in Thailand does not have to pay taxes (Poosuwan, 2013).

In addition, some children only attend cram school just because all of their friends do and post a financial burden to their parent as some famous tutoring institution tend to be expensive. Tutoring institution become substitute goods for traditional school as they offer flexible time table and less formal atmosphere. And this circumstance gives a considerably difficulty for those with limited economic background.

In economic aspect, financial burden can be one of the obstacle preventing children from attending school as the minimum wages in Thailand is relatively low compared to the living expense. Many children decided not to continue on high school due to financial insecurity and they have to work to help their parents. And as mentioned by the Ministry of Education report, many parents could not spend time with their children during their early age because of working hours, the problem regarding equal distribution of income still remains a huge problem in Thai society.

Not only the exam is a problem, but also the curriculum of Thai education system. Even though the Ministry of education adjusted and improved some curriculum, some issues remains. Firstly, there is a hidden political agenda in education, such as in history subject, some events was cut out because it effect the legitimacy of the government. Secondly, the religious study still remains in Thai curriculum, particularly Buddhism. And last problem, the conservative social values in Thai education for example the health and gender education. Those who designed the curriculum have perspective that the issue regarding sex education is taboo in Thai society, which could be a major contribution to the problem of teen pregnancy and lack of perennial skills.

Another point that is often overlooked is the political instability and lack of coherence of education policy. Since the programme was implemented in 2000, Thailand had already had two Coups with almost 15 cabinet shifts. In another words, Thai government changed the Minister of Education 15 times within 16 years, means that each minister got to work for only a year (Poosuwan, 2014). With that frequent shuffle, the education policy style of each ministers caused the lack of continuity in policy.

As RTG focuses on create a quality learning society after 2015, it should focus on the quality of education and the human resource development. The curriculum of Thai Education still has a long way to go since some problems stemmed from the perception of people in education governance. The curriculum should not be bias, or at least it should present the fact and let the students analyse on their own.

The problem regarding the wages is another contributor to education problems. Parents have to spend a lot of their time working in order to earn income and pay for children tuition fee and in some case, cream school fees. In most case that children drop out of school is because of the insufficient funds to support their education. Thus, an increasing wages would not only help improve their quality of life but also reduce the dropout rate of children from secondary school.

Correspondingly, the basic knowledge regarding being parents and sex education should not be a taboo to talk about in health education in school. Teenagers should be educated how to prevent pregnancy rather get blamed for interested in those issue.

Then again, the knowledge regarding the children rights of free basic education should be provided for parents since some of them do not know the right of free education so their children does not go to school due to economic limitation.

Lastly, the issue regarding the paper test based should be demolished. It may be true that test is the method to measure student output of education, it could rarely tell the outcome of the student. Those who get high score on ONET test are not guaranteed great social skill and survival skills. Hence, more emphasises should be paid to survival social skills as well as critical thinking ability.

Generally speaking, The EFA programme in Thailand could partially achieved it objectives. The Education for All need to be more inclusive and the social problems often overlooked in Thai case. More attention should be paid on other dimension such as economic issue or cultural issue as it is influential issues for education development. For the most part, the problems lie on the education governance as well as the family affairs. The related institutions need to look deeper into the social problems and accept that it exists, then they will know what point should be improved.

Reference

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The broken promise of EFA in Thai education system : a critical analysis of the UNESCO Education For All programmes implementation in Thailand

Written by Gigi