is done with less certainty about the role of the council on budget management, and with lower chances for the real budget to be used as an input for education authorities above the school level. For the long term this gap reduces the transparency of school financing and reduces the potential for analyzing the efficiency of the school budget.

# **4.4 Assessment of School and Student Performance**

School assessments can have a significant effect on school performance because they force parents and teachers to agree on scoring rules and ways to keep track of them, allowing for accountability about student learning to emerge in a useful way. Measuring student assessment is another important way to determine if a school is effective in improving learning. A key aspect of school autonomy is the regular measurement of student learning, with the intent of using the results to inform parents and society, and to make adjustments to managerial and pedagogical practices. Without a regular assessment of learning outcomes school accountability is reduced and, with it, improving education quality becomes less certain.

There are five sub-indicators for assessment:

- a. Existence and frequency of school and student assessment

- b. Use of school assessments for making school adjustments

- c. Frequency of standardized student assessments

- d. Use of student assessments for pedagogical and personnel adjustments

- e. Publication of school and student assessments

Thailand has two government agencies in charge of system assessment: The Office for National Education Standards and Quality Assessment (ONESQA), which is responsible for school assessment, and the National Institute of Educational Testing Service (NIETS), which is responsible for student assessment. ONESQA is an autonomous agency responsible for conducting external evaluations of school quality in basic and post-secondary education, as mandated by the National Education Act of 1999 (Office of the National Education Commission 2003; Kingdom of Thailand 2000, 2003, 2004, 2009). Between 1999 and 2010, ONESQA conducted two complete rounds of school assessments in 40,000 schools, using an “amicable assessment model” to evaluate school performance. This approach compares a school’s performance with the standards set by the Ministry of Education using statistical data, indicators of quality, and a listing of the school’s strengths and weaknesses within an environment of cooperation in which consequences for low performance are framed in a positive way.

Assessments yield a set of recommendations, which should be implemented by failing schools during a grace period. Failing schools are revisited to verify compliance with the recommendations of the assessment. Every school in the country is assessed every five years by a team of evaluators employed and trained by ONESQA. Thus, the third round of evaluations began in 2011. For this round of evaluation ONESQA assessments began covering four areas: (1) learning outcomes; (2) school administration and management; (3) student-centered teaching and learning practices; and (4) internal procedures for quality assurance.

In 2010, an external evaluation committee reviewed ONESQA’s performance and gave it a _Good_ rating (85 percent), one level lower than the maximum rating of Very Good (90-100 percent). Most of the recommendations received by ONESQA were operational in nature and aimed at improving performance efficiency. However, a recent analysis of Thai education states that 15