Political Will Sorely Lacking in Thai Educational Reform

In her policy statement to Parliament on September 12, Thailand’s newly appointed Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra said, “Thai education still has several qualitative obstacles and is unable to produce a workforce which meets the needs of the new economy.” Yet, in a highly anticipated speech on his vision for Thailand in late August, former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra outlined a packed list of initiatives but had remarkably little to say about education.

The sad truth is that educational quality in the kingdom has fallen victim to politics. Without demonstrating political will for educational reform, including supporting a badly needed overhaul of the curriculum and furthering the capability of local schools, improving Thai education remains an insurmountable challenge.

Thai education, as it stands, is lagging behind (Table 1). Standardised tests administered by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) demonstrated a consistent downward trend in the educational attainment of Thai students over the past decade. In 2022, PISA scores revealed that Thai students ranked 58th for maths and science, and 64th for reading. The PISA study assessed 81 OECD countries that participated in the examinations. A new test of creative thinking ability also showed that Thai students scored significantly lower than the OECD average, and also lower than neighbours Vietnam and Malaysia.

Thailand Lags Behind

Table 1

Meanwhile, another study published by the World Bank in 2023 found that 64.7 per cent of Thais scored below threshold levels of foundational reading literacy while 74.1 per cent underperformed in foundational digital skills.

This underperformance is caused in part by systemic obstacles. A lack of policy continuity at the top has long been a problem: the past 20 years have seen no less than 17 different education ministers in Thailand. And fundamentally, as the political economy expert, Professor Richard Doner, has argued, a lack of “systemic vulnerability” — which he defines as scarcity in resources and external security threats — has allowed Thai politicians to focus on clientelist practices and political patronage instead. As a result, there has been neglect of institutional weaknesses in state agencies critical for human capital development. This has left them “technically incompetent” and “frequently corrupt”. The long-term impact of prolonged Covid-19 lockdowns has also made Thailand’s educational issues more serious. Faced with old impediments and new problems, the current government has not yet revealed a viable strategy to move Thai education forward.

The national curriculum, for one, is in danger of becoming increasingly obsolete. Since the passage of the National Education Act in 1999 and the launch of the 2008 core curriculum, there has been little substantive change to the content of Thai education. An updated National Education Act did not pass in time before former prime minister Prayut Chan-o-cha dissolved Parliament last year. The Prayut administration also aborted the development of a new competency-based curriculum that would have placed a greater emphasis on active learning.

Even as curriculum reform faltered at the national level, however, the Prayut government pursued one innovative new policy: the “education sandboxes”. In 2019, the Prayut administration passed the Education Innovation Area Act, which established eight provinces (later expanded to 19) as educational “experimental areas” where schools were allowed to adjust the national core curriculum and learning materials as they saw fit. In theory, schools could even adopt foreign educational systems if they wished.

With teachers liberalised in these education sandboxes, some schools took the opportunity to deviate from the traditional rote-learning practices, integrating problem-based, research-based and project-based approaches to learning in their classrooms. Other schools customised the curriculum to suit the needs of their localities, with some schools in Chiang Mai starting to teach in hill tribe languages.

The sad truth is that educational quality in the kingdom has fallen victim to politics. Without demonstrating political will for educational reform, including supporting a badly needed overhaul of the curriculum and furthering the capability of local schools, improving Thai education remains an insurmountable challenge.

In a study conducted by the Thailand Development Research Institute, promising early signs indicated that student and teacher motivation increased. At the same time, learning attainment had not yet improved. However, before a definitive conclusion can be drawn regarding the education sandboxes’ success — whether or not local schools truly have sufficient capacity to deliver markedly improved outcomes — the experiment now runs the risk of becoming politicised.

In 2023, the Pheu Thai government granted its most important coalition partner, the Bhumjaithai Party, control of the Ministry of Education. Since then, the only new province granted education sandbox status was Buriram province, which Bhumjaithai counts as its main stronghold. Whether Bhumjaithai will reform education at the national level remains to be seen.

To add to this, the Education Minister Permpoon Chidchob, a former police officer with no experience in education, came under criticism after he was quoted praising North Korea’s education system. His signature policy is the Riendee Meesook (“Good and happy learning”) scheme, which critics have argued resembles more a “fleeting campaign” than a sustained reform programme. Meanwhile, a new National Education Act is still under discussion.

Given the necessity of power-sharing with coalition partners, both the previous prime minister, Srettha Thavisin and the new prime minister, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, have had little sway over educational policy.

Perhaps here lies precisely the stumbling block that dooms Thai education to continued mediocrity. It needs more than abortive schemes to improve. It will need sustained attention from reformers dedicated to updating the national curriculum in a way that will target the development of necessary foundational skills and foster critical thinking within the term of the current Parliament. Education reform will also require the upgrading of the institutional capacities of local actors so that they can successfully carry out more demanding educational tasks that they are now being tasked with doing under these decentralising initiatives.

But with the Ministry of Education still being treated more as a reward for coalitional loyalty than as a vehicle for development that requires careful guidance, Thai educational reform lacks the political will to succeed.

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