Education minister Hang Chuon Naron speaks at the closing ceremony of the Secondary Education Improvement Project (SEIP) on July 29. MOEYS
Minister of Education, Youth and Sport Hang Chuon Naron said that nearly 500,000 students have achieved improved academic results due to the positive impacts of the implementation of the five year plan of the Secondary Education Improvement Project (SEIP), which began in 2017 and ended this year.
Speaking at the July 29 SEIP closing ceremony at the Royal University of Phnom Penh (RUPP), he said hat through this project 300 to 600 school principals and 2,134 teachers have all received additional training as educators and it had positively impacted up to 700 schools and nearly half a million students resulting in improved academic results.
He praised the management and stakeholders who implemented the project successfully as well as the spirit of working together towards a common goal with the involvement of stakeholders and guidance from the project director as well.
“The ultimate purpose of this project is to transform it from a project to improve secondary education into a mechanism for reforming the entire education sector at the school level and adopt other reform mechanisms such as improving schools and the education system,” he said.
Lor Chhorvanna, project manager of SEIP, said that the project has been implemented over the past five years and it spent about $40 million, starting from July 6, 2017 until July 29.
Chhorvanna said that the project had selected 100 target schools located in 67 districts nationwide.
“The objective of the SEIP was to expand lower secondary education to achieve minimum standards in target areas, and to provide immediate and effective response in case of an eligible crisis or emergency,” he said.
“The five-year implementation’s results were predicted to have 20,000 students as beneficiaries, but the actual results saw over 450,000 benefit or an increase of 20 times the expected results,” he said.
Chhorvanna said that this result could be due to shifting the student bodies at the neighbouring schools to the target school as part of the pandemic planning, thus increasing the number of students and beneficiaries of this project by up to 20 times more than expected.
As expected, about 50 per cent of girl students were expected from the project, but in fact it was up to 52.3 per cent, which is higher than expected. And the expected target schools to receive minimum standard was 70, but the actual results were 94 target schools that benefited. However, six schools did not meet the minimum standards of the project.
“Within the framework of project implementation, we have studied both successes and failures, such as the six schools that did not meet the minimum standards. We had conducted the study and found out that they were facing with human resources in implementing this project.
“Evaluating the project, we see that the project was very successful, satisfied, with the support and approval of all partners and relevant ministries and institutions,” he said.
No Fata, Education Specialist at World Bank, congratulated the education ministry and the Ministry of Economy on working together to implement the project with greater success than expected.
“When we use the word ‘success’ in the World Bank system, we have regular assessments. We do the evaluation in every six month. We have supporting mission,” he said.
He said that since the fourth year of the project’s implementation began, this project has been considered one of the most satisfactory undertaken at the institution as the first educational project and among those most praised both by international and in-house economists.
“The evaluation is on many sectors. We looked at implementation, sustainability, institutional capacity, the process of project work and the institutional strength for the capacity for this project. The project is successful and it’s mostly implemented in Cambodia, so we’ve shown we can achieve these results quickly,” he said.
He said that the World Bank has used all this experience to implement its next project, called the General Knowledge Improvement Project, which has signed a contract since the end of June.
The next project could take this experience and potentially expand it to 1,000 primary schools, 420 secondary schools and 210 kindergartens.
“This project’s experience will be taken and used in the next project. We will also change from school management to a school community strategy,” he said.
