Educational Finance in Thailand - UNESCO Bangkok

An assessment of information system capacity and effectiveness (staff capacity,
decision needs)
At national level
Each organization has its own information system and mechanism for planning
and management. It was found that three educational statistic data bases in the Office of
Permanent Secretary: Planning Section, Educational Management Information System
Center, and the Office of Inspector General were developed to get the same type of
information. The data at the planning section is collected from all departments in MOE.
EMISC has requested the Provincial Education Offices to collect data from local areas
while the Office of Inspector General designs its own data collecting forms to gather data
from local areas. Only the data base conducted by the planning section seems to get the
most up-to-date data that is sufficient to supply policy makers. EMISC and the Office of
Inspector General are changing to use the same data reported by each department.
In addition, all basic education institutions in the country are required to submit
the nation-wide statistics reporting form to the Office of National Statistics for
processing. There are some duplicated efforts that make a burden workload to local areas
as well as organizations in lines of ministry.
EMISC, which has been trying to create MIS database software for local
school/center, but has not solved the problem of how to develop applications suitable to
administrate and manage many types of schools in various departments. Some schools
and centers are operated in different regulations and principles. It seems impossible for
EMISC to develop or use software that works routinely in the local environment.
Therefore, in trying to establish the national database network, the new software
developed by an outside professional company with the cost of 7.9 million Baht was
designed by EMISC. The school needs to enter educational statistical data in the system,
which is the same data as on the nation-wide statistics reporting form. The school can use
those data for its own management. Schools can update data through internet or send data
to district, district to province, and province to region or to department, and to EMISC. It
is hoped that in this way the MOE will be able to create the national education database
sufficiently for the decision makers at each level.
However, from the researcher’s point of view, there are still two management
issues to consider. First, even the database designed to get data from the primary sources
schools must still enter the number of students, number of teachers, and sum of others.
These data are not generated from a student’s database. If a school has separated software
to manage their student’s records and registration, it will once again create a burden of
duplicate the data entry. Secondly, error from data entry can not be controlled by the
system. In fact, a school needs to have MIS database software to manage its routine
work. How the system design can be easy to use, flexible, dynamic, and versatile as well
as to link and exchange data with any existing systems should be kept in mind when
developing any application software.
Table 5 shows the assessment of information systems at the central level.
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