Primary school enrollment in Phnom Penh has declined for the first time in at least five years, making space for more preschool classes in the city’s crowded primary facilities, school officials said this week.
The reasons for the decline in class size remain in dispute, but some experts say it is because more students are attending private schools.
Phnom Penh’s Municipal Education Department has been trying to move more preschool classes into primary schools since early this year. However, overcrowding meant there were no free spaces, said department head Oum Heoung.
Now, he said, more classes will be moved as spaces are becoming available.
Current data from the Ministry of Education’s department of planning also indicate that Phnom Penh primary schools have become less crowded over the past year, though only slightly.
“We [still] lack teachers, and also classrooms,” said Kuy Phala, deputy director of the Department of Planning.
In the 2001-02 school year, the average number of pupils per classroom was 93, usually divided into two shifts; the average class size was 46. This year the number of pupils per classroom fell about 4 percent.
The percentage of school-aged children in Phnom Penh who were enrolled in public school has also fallen, from 89 percent in the 2001-02 school year to 85.6 percent the following year, said Peter De Vries, project education officer at the UN Children’s Fund.
The drop comes even though, according to population projections from the 1998 census, the number of primary school-aged students in Phnom Penh should have risen about 10.5 percent this year, Kuy Phala said.
Although her department does not track private school attendance, she said the discrepancy can be explained by more students attending private schools.
Oum Heoung said that many parents are eschewing public schools for younger students as well. Private preschools, he said, attract parents with more attractive facilities and furnishings, but do not live up to public school standards in areas such as class size. He said young children get the best preschool education in Phnom Penh’s municipal schools.
The program to put more preschool classes in primary schools began as a convenience for overburdened families, Oum Heoung said. “The brother can take care of the younger brother,” he said, “and it saves time for the parents.” Many parents complained about having to drop off their children at different schools that were far apart, he added.
Phnom Penh has 111 public primary schools and 52 preschools; 35 of those preschools are attached to primary schools.
Early learning programs such as preschool are now widely believed to have a substantial influence on students’ performance in primary school.
Officials pointed out that the lack of preschool facilities is much greater in rural and remote areas than in Phnom Penh. According to Kuy Phala’s statistics, only about 7 percent of children nationwide attend preschool.
