The Cabinet, during its meeting on 25 December 2012, approved the scholarship project, following the proposal by the Ministry of Education.
The project, to be carried out from 2013 to 2018,
requires a budget of 78 million baht. It seeks to offer about 150 scholarships
a year on average.
Under the project, 600 teachers will be produced for
schools supervised by the Office of the Basic Education Commission. Out of this
number, 200 will teach Japanese; 140 will teach Korean; 60 will teach French;
40 will teach German; and another 40 will teach Spanish. Other languages –
Vietnamese, Myanmar, Cambodian, Bahasa Malaysia, and Bahasa Indonesia – will
have 25 teachers for each language. The remaining 20 teachers will teach
Russian.
According to the Ministry of Education, this project will
help ease the shortage of teachers in the foreign languages that are important
to the global economy and spoken by Thailand’s major trading partners and other
ASEAN countries. Those who are selected to receive the scholarships will attend
training in the respective countries. Having completed the training, they will
be recruited to teach the languages, which are considered the second foreign
languages in Thailand after English.
Meanwhile, the Office of the Basic Education Commission
is in need of almost 60,000 teachers for various schools across the country.
Mathematics comes first, with the highest number of teachers that are needed,
followed by the English language, the Thai language, social studies, arts
education, computer science, physical education, pre-school education, student
development activities, and special education.
The Ministry of Education is also working out a plan to
accelerate the production of a skilled workforce to ease labor shortages in the
industrial sector and to meet the expected growing demand when ASEAN becomes a
single community in 2015.
Statistics compiled by the Federation of Thai industries
show that, from 2011 to 2015, demand for skilled workers in three industries is
higher than production by between threefold and fourfold. The three industries
are involved with automobiles, electronics, and construction. It is estimated
that 1.2 million personnel would be needed for the industries in the next few
years.
The Ministry of Education is gathering information about
labor shortages in various fields in order to adjust its plan for the
production of professional workers. The move will help Thailand prepare its
workforce in an attempt to prevent labor shortages after the realization of the
ASEAN Community.
(thailand.prd.go.th)