Inter Press Service - December 12, 2003
Roxanne Toh

A total of 86.7 percent of primary school-age boys are enrolled in Thailand, but the figure for girls is lower at 84.1 percent.

"Thailand's achievements are well ahead of many countries. Nonetheless, it is still a country with development challenges to be overcome - with shortcomings, shortfalls," stated Robert England, resident coordinator of the United Nations system at the Thai National Launch of the Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report 2003/4 on Friday.

"There are disparities, but we will try to do what we have done, better," said Prapatpong Senarith, secretary general of the Thailand National Commission for the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

While the net enrolment figures in Thailand are much better than many other Asian countries, especially in South and West Asia, they have not improved much since 1990, according to experts at the launch.

That means that this is a weakness that Thailand must work on if it is to achieve the goal of gender parity - equal proportions of girls and boys enrolled in school - by 2005, as governments committed in the Education for All conference in Senegal in 2000.

An indicator of where Thailand is the fact that its net enrolment ratios at present are lower than the Philippines and Malaysia - and almost comparable to Cambodia's 89.2 percent for boys and 81.5 percent for girls.

Thus, Thailand just might not achieve the goal of gender parity in primary education 2015, according to the EFA report.

These enrolment ratios mean that there are some 437,000 boys and 513,000 girls not in primary school, for a total of nearly one million children of school age who are not in school.

"There has been so little improvement (in this trend) and the trend is so flat that without special efforts to improve it" it will be difficult for Thailand to achieve gender parity, said Sheldon Shaeffer, director of the Asia-Pacific Regional Bureau for Education of UNESCO.

Prapatpong Senarith said that the girls who are not enrolled in primary school include those from the hill tribes, those from southern Thailand where human development indicators are lower, and those from the slums of Bangkok. There are also some who enrol in Grade One, but drop out not long after.

Thai officials also said the slower improvement of net enrollment in primary school is due to the fact that it is harder to close the gap when the figures are nearer the goal.

"It's much easier to improve from, say, 60 percent up, but not when you are already in the eighty and ninety-plus percent," said Sombat Suwanpitak, director of bureau of policy and strategy at the office of the permanent secretary at the education ministry.

He added that the remaining gap to be closed, as in the case of enrolment in primary school, consists of those in the "marginal population and reaching them needs a specific strategy".

Not surprisingly in Thailand though, there are more underlying factors that contribute to the country's low Gender Parity Index (GPI) - not only the lack of education provided for children in hill tribes but the exclusion of citizens who do not speak the national language, Thai.

Somsak said that "discrimination against in education is almost not seen in Thailand", but that the trend of fewer girls in schools is due to poverty and other factors. "More girls are now in school, but there is still some way to go."

Thailand's GPI -- a comparison of enrolment rate at Grade One between girls and boys -- stands at 0.94, 1.0 being a state of perfect parity. This is similar to the Philippines and Cambodia, while Laos lags far behind at 0.88.

But the country has some healthy education figures as well.

While it might not achieve the goal of gender parity in primary education by 2015, it has done better in pre-primary education and secondary education.

Thailand's investment in education is also second in East Asia - it spends 5.5 percent of GDP on the sector, the ideal being around 6 percent. Thai spending on education is second only to Malaysia, and better than Japan, South Korea and Singapore.

Shaeffer remarked that maybe countries should also be looking more specifically at who are those not in school, and praised a Thai programme where schools actually go out and look for children who are not enrolled.

Often, he said the girls not in school will include those who do not speak the national language, are in rural areas, disabled or have illnesses like HIV/AIDS.

If countries focus only on the figures of children who are enrolled, it is easy to be "satisfied" with their performance, Shaeffer explained. Perhaps it is time too to focus on the "non-enrolment" figure, he added.

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