Educational Finance in Thailand - UNESCO Bangkok

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Final Report, Volume II/3 Anthony. Cresswell: Educational Finance UNESCO-PROAP TA 2996-THA Education Management and Finance Study July 1999 a.2. Educational Equalization Support - allocates financial resources to enhance the educational opportunities for disadvantaged students and institutions. a.3. Educational Quality Assurance - ensures that high quality performance of the educational system at all levels is developed and enhanced. There will be a mix of central and provincial operations to assess and support both the management and instructional performance of educational institutions. a.4. Educational Research and Quality Improvement – conducts and supports research and assessment activities. Allocates funds for competitive innovation projects a.5. Educational Infrastructure Development – capital investment from central funds and subsidies for equalization of local capacity for disadvantaged areas. b. Each program serves a distinctive purpose and consequently has a different finance mechanism. c. The budget for the Research and Quality Improvement program could be built from the existing Quality Improvement program and additional funds for the development of the research base for a national-level assessment and quality assurance capacity. Some consolidation of these activities into a single responsible agency (perhaps as part of the ONEC), would be desirable. The National Educational Standards and Quality Assessment Office, described in the new Education Bill, could be the location for such activities. Such an office could be the source of grants to schools and other organizations to support the development of the necessary tools and techniques. The funds should be allocated on a competitive basis for projects and research activities that have high potential to improve the overall quality of the educational system. d. The fifth role is a recasting of the capital investment portions of the educational budget. The responsibility for infrastructure development and maintenance should be shared by the national and lower levels of the system. The national level responsibility should extend to a mix of major infrastructure projects with national importance (such as networking infrastructure for schools), and support for local and provincial investment. 10.2.2. Plan for increase in overall education expenditure The overall level of financial allocation from the government and private sources appears to be roughly in line with other countries in the region. But there is still a gap between Thailand’s level of investment in education and that of more developed countries. Longer term planning should include goals of increasing the allocations to education to at least 5 % of GDP, which would be achieved by maintaining the recent upward trend. 10.2.3. Review capital expenditure needs The balance among types of expenditure for the current and recent past budgets seems tipped in favor of heavier investment on the capital side. It is not clear whether this is a result of specific policies to enhance infrastructure, or just the accumulated effect of uncoordinated decisions. The new finance policies, 12
Final Report, Volume II/3 Anthony. Cresswell: Educational Finance UNESCO-PROAP TA 2996-THA Education Management and Finance Study July 1999 especially expanding opportunities for secondary education may require continued high capital expenditure in the short run to build the necessary facilities. The Government should conduct a detailed facility capacity study to examine this possibility. 10.2.4. Reduce subsidies to higher education and central administration Expenditures on central administration also appear to be larger than necessary, and will probably drop as a result of downsizing and consolidation of central Ministries. The level of expenditure on higher education subsidies cannot be justified on either efficiency or equity grounds and should be reduced. Increased investments in pre-primary and primary education quality and access are likely to produce greater returns in terms of overall quality and efficiency. Distribution of financial and teacher resources appears to treat most provinces and regions equally, but does little to compensate for economic disadvantages. The allocation of financial resources to higher education is an exception to this general pattern, since higher education resource allocations tend to be disequalizing, going disproportionately to wealthier provinces. 10.2.5. Local funding of staff through block grants a. The block grant approach, if fully implemented, should cover all the school financial resources, including staff salaries. Since these salaries and the staff that go with the salaries are such a large and important component of the operation, they should be subject to managerial control and decision making at the operational (institutional) level. That is, the funding of staff salaries, as well as the financing of other resources, should in effect follow the children. b. To implement the block grant approach to staffing and salaries in a short period of time could be very disruptive to morale, overall staffing patterns, and abruptly place a large additional administrative load on the local administrators. The move to the full block grant approach should therefore be planned over a longer time frame and proceed in stages over a five or more year period. c. The description of the finance scheme also raises a number of possible issues of personnel and salary policy. For some of these issues, it is assumed that the existing personnel policies with respect to benefits, pensions, and matters of routine personnel administration will remain unchanged. The main changes will be in the locus of the hiring and retention decision, and the establishment of salary levels. The issues of salary levels and hiring are discussed in Section 2.1.4.6, below. 10.2.6. Appropriate expenditure and cost sharing levels a. This block grant or student count-driven approach to educational finance requires a way of setting per-student amounts or guidelines. In the current policymaking setting for educational finance in Thailand, this is commonly referred to as the “unit cost” issue. In these recommendations, however, it is referred to instead as the issue of per-student amounts or guidelines. This is done to 13
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mission and operations. The term
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The information requirements for fi
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Table 1: Continued Dept. Flow of Re
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Table 1: Continued Dept. Flow of Re
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Description and assessment of compu
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Table 3: Existing computer systems
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Table 3: Continued Current existing
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Description of flows of financial i
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(teachers, facilities, etc) if data
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Table 4: Continued. Content of curr
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Table 5: Assessment of information
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An assessment of information system
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general administration, these syste
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Recommendation for IS Most involved
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6. The nation wide implementation.
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References Office of the permanent
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Office of private education commiss
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Interviews 10 September 1998, 9:00-
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Appendix 2 Projections of Costs of
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Projected Cost Increases for Expand
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Identification of Schools for Sampl
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8. Please place an X in a box below
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enrollment as a whole growing at an
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Figure 1: Thailand’s Development
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Table 5: Crude transition rates of
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and level of education, 1993 and 19
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2.31 Questionable quality of educat
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income inequality between agricultu
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4.1.4. The percentages calculated f
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Table 11: Public and Private sector
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4.3.8. As would be expected, unempl
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5.7 The dilemma is to balance the s
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Table 14: Unemployment and Underemp
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there any activities that would be
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References Chalongphob Sussangkarn
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Appendix 6 BMA Voucher Policy A. Lo
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Appendix 7 Finance Allocation Metho
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Appendix 8 Program Structure of the
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Not all possible flows are show, si
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Appendix 11 Results of Regression A
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