Pipe dream 4.0? Thailand labours to fill in skills gap
A subpar education system risks leaving Thailand’s innovation drive stuck in first gear. By Busaba Sivasomboon
Thailand’s Education Minister Teerakiat Jareonsettasin poses a rhetorical question: Would people prefer an electric car developed in the Southeast Asian nation, or one made by Tesla Inc.?
“Are you dreaming?”, Mr Teerakiat asked. “We can’t even invent a motorbike.”
Mr Teerakiat, Thailand’s 20th education minister in 17 years, is trying to close the skills gap in a country struggling to match some of the education gains made by Southeast Asian neighbours. His strategy includes giving more autonomy to schools, universities and teachers to boost standards.
Thailand’s challenge is a major one: The latest triennial Programme for International Student Assessment results ranked it 54 out of 70 countries, even though education received about a fifth of the 2.73 trillion baht annual budget, one of the largest expenditure items. Singapore was the top performer in the PISA assessment, with Japan second, Taiwan fourth, China sixth, and Vietnam eighth.
“We have a big gap in this country,” said Mr Teerakiat, referring to the assessment rankings, which showed Thai student scores for maths, sciences and reading falling sharply since the 2012 survey to well below the international average.
“Whatever we have done, hasn’t worked,” he said.
Since seizing power three years ago, Thailand’s military government has put the spotlight on promoting innovation and advanced industries to help lift the economy from the middle-income trap under the Thailand 4.0 scheme.
One area of focus is industrial development along the Eastern Seaboard. Thailand realises it needs to upgrade workforce skills to support the US$45 billion Eastern Economic Corridor project, Industry Minister Uttama Savanayana told Bloomberg last month.
Yet with the working age population expected to shrink by about 11% as a share of the total population by 2040, “the education and skills challenge takes on an special importance and urgency,” said Ulrich Zachau, the World Bank’s Southeast Asia country director in Bangkok.
“On the one hand, Thailand is rapidly ageing, and, on the other hand, the need for skilled workers is rapidly increasing in an ever more integrated world with ever faster technological advances,” he said.
High levels of digitisation and internet penetration make Thailand an attractive destination for IT companies to pilot new products, said Anip Sharma, senior vicepresident with responsibility for Southeast Asia at global education sector consultancy Parthenon-EY.
“But it’s not a great place to develop a product,” said Mr Sharma. One of the biggest problems, he says, is a lack of English language penetration.
Another issue, said veteran Thai software developer Panutat Tejasen, is that most graduates are schooled using oldfashioned methods, such as rote learning and lack the critical thinking skills needed to develop creative software solutions.
“My company pays those newbies just to get them knowledge on how to write usable software programs before they can start working and making money,” said Mr Panutat.
Natavudh Pungcharoenpong, the founder of Bangkok-based e-book publisher Ookbee, blames obsolete thinking for holding back his business.
“There are new businesses that can’t be governed by the existing mindset of the authorities,” he said. “That’s not the way to drive growth.”
He cites as examples his own difficulties convincing authorities to extend a valueadded tax exemption on printed books to ebooks, as well as the way regulations make it challenging for services such as Uber and Facebook to operate.
The National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission could not immediately be reached to comment about regulations governing Facebook. The Land Transport Department said Uber is viewed as illegal.
Mr Sharma said Vietnam is doing much better at encouraging new thinking despite being poorer. Thailand’s history of political turmoil is not conducive to encouraging improvements to the education system either, he said.
“There hasn’t been a consistent approach t o strong i mplementation and that’s hurt Thailand, big time,” said Mr Sharma.
“We have 20,000 bureaucrats who don’t teach but are running schools,” said Mr Teerakiat, adding that one of the main obstacles to reform may be the Education Ministry itself. “In Vietnam, there are only 70 in their ministry.”
He said corruption is another problem. “If I were like the previous politicians, I’d be the richest man this month,” he said.
Mr Teerakiat said a bottom-up strategy that gives schools and universities more autonomy to make decisions is the best way forward. The same principle should apply to teacher training because it suffered in the past from rigid central planning that demoralised teachers, he said.
Mr Teerakiat announced a new voucher system earlier this month that enables universities and colleges to offer their own courses, and gives prospective teachers freedom to choose areas they want to be trained in.
“The website for teacher training, usually there’s only one or two hits, if you’re lucky,” he said. “Yesterday alone: 28.8 million hits. It’s just amazing to see when you use the market system, when you empower them, when you abolish the central planning, use the bottom-up approach, things work phenomenally. It has never happened in Thailand.”