The sobering reality of Cambodia’s free education drive
By: Paul Millar - Posted on: October 1, 2018 | Cambodia

Although Cambodia has had much success in ensuring its citizens have access to public education – including the return to the classroom of almost 60,000 children who had not been attending school full time in the past year alone – the Kingdom is still a long way from reaching the UN’s goal of providing compulsory high-quality education for all of its citizens free of charge by 2015.

On paper, at least, the Kingdom appears fully committed to providing free education for its people. Cambodia’s constitution, adopted in 1993 after decades of civil war, mandated free primary and secondary public education. Another education law passed in 2007 echoed this requirement for the state to provide a compulsory nine years of free access to public schools. And for those children held back by disability or learning difficulties – by some estimates, as many as one in five – Cambodian law could be counted among the most progressive in the world.

“Aside from these provisions pertaining to free access to all, the State also specifically encourages and promotes access to special education for children with disabilities and outstanding learners who are gifted and/or talented,” the Unesco report said. “The law stipulates that the rights of able-bodied learners should be the same ones enjoyed by those with disabilities.”

But for many children across Cambodia, the noble ideals expressed in the nation’s laws fall painfully short of the reality on the ground. Vorn Samphors, country programme director for the international education nonprofit Aide et Action, which spearheads the Cambodian Consortium for Out of School Children, said that a quarter of a million children in Cambodia continue to slip through the cracks of the Kingdom’s education system.

“The recent survey from the Ministry of Education and Unesco found that over 250,000 out-of-school children [spread across Cambodia’s rural areas],” he told Southeast Asia Globe. “So that needs further collaboration and intervention to provide both access… and quality.
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