New Generation School education reform in Cambodia: A farewell to shadow education?

Abstract

For some decades, basic education in Cambodia has suffered from financial difficulties, a perceived low quality, overloaded curriculum and educational inequalities (Brehm 2021; Bray et al. 2016). Students and their families have sought private tutoring, or so-called “shadow education”, which has been supplementing the basic education system. Over the years, private tutoring has become part of a school culture leading to more social and educational inequalities. Driven by equity and quality concerns, the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of Cambodia has recently introduced a novel education reform known as a New Generation School (NGS) initiative. This reform aims to provide quality education for students in order to enable them to obtain essential knowledge and skills to be ready for 21st-century job markets. At the same time, the initiative aims to eliminate the private tutoring culture ingrained in schools oftentimes offered by public school teachers for their own students, creating potential risks of corruption (Dawson 2009; Kobakhidze 2014). Drawing on a qualitative interview with 14 students (Grade 11 and 12) from two NGS initiatives, this paper analyses the implementation of NGS reform with reference to whether shadow education is likely to exist continuously with, or be subjugated by such an education reform. The interviews were conducted remotely using Zoom and lasted around 30 minutes. The findings demonstrated that the majority of the students interviewed were participating in private classes. Students interviewed reported the following reasons for attending private classes: exam preparation; the need to complete more exercises; inability to catch up with lessons in NGS initiatives; the necessity to undertake private classes; and more. It seems that private tutoring has not been eliminated by the new reform. Students and families do not fully trust the public education system, and private tutoring has been helping to keep the NGS initiative running; challenges associated with it have not disappeared in New Generation Schools. This evidence raises questions regarding the reform and calls for more policy, scholarly and public attention to be given to this topic.