752
M. Saratun and P. Dharmapiya (Piboolsravut)
workshops and camps. The Ministry of Education includes the sufficiency school
program in the career advancement portfolio of school personnel as an incentive, and
train school superintendents to assess schools for sufficiency school accreditation.
Thanks to using the bottom-up approach and an incentive system, the change has
expanded accordingly, and has had a chance to sustain itself.
There is a Ministry of Education policy to rotate school principals every four years
among schools. This provides a challenge to schools accredited as sufficiency-based,
since the new principal may not be familiar with SEP.
In some sufficiency schools, new headmasters often fail to continue the sufficiency
momentum, since they also want to implement their own new initiatives. When this
happened, the quality of the sufficiency movement reduced. The sufficiency spirit
was not kept up. Therefore, it is important to study the SEP educational processes that
can be sustained, and key success factors. Hopefully, this will provide guidelines of
SEP educational management for sustainability for educational institutions, relevant
organizations, and agencies both in Thailand and abroad.
2 Sustainability of School Initiatives and Interventions
Hargreaves (2007) defined sustainable education change as development, which
allows newly-evolved learning to continue and receive financial support and
resources. At the same time, the change does not negatively affect the school environment and education system. From the organizational perspective, Avery (2005)
provided three criteria to identify sustainable organizations. First, they continue to
deliver consistently strong performance. Second, they demonstrate a capacity to
endure numerous difficult economic and social situations. Third, they maintain a
leadership position in their relevant sector. Therefore, in this study, the definition of
sustainability in sufficiency-based schools is that the SEP mindset is continuously
implemented in a school. When facing a crisis such as a change of school principals who do not support SEP, the school can still maintain the cultivation of an SEP
mindset. The result is demonstrated in students’ sustained SEP mindset.
Previous studies on sustainability in school initiatives have typically regarded the
process of maintaining school initiatives as an end stage of the program. However,
waiting to build sustainability planning at the end might not provide sufficient time to
deliver effective sustainability efforts. Sustainability planning and monitoring needs
to be continuous throughout the process for it to be successful. Therefore, recent
approaches to sustainability have also called for implementing a sustainability plan
into earlier program development stages (Fagen and Flay 2009).
The change in the school may not be sustainable, possibly because of failed leadership, and pressure of other competing initiatives from external systems. Therefore,
school development should not depend on one person or one single factor. Sustainability demands the competence and involvement of the main stakeholders of the
school (Giles and Hargreaves 2006). Datnow and Stringfield (2000) suggested that
the maintenance of efforts to implement school changes depend on educators at var-
M. Saratun and P. Dharmapiya (Piboolsravut)
workshops and camps. The Ministry of Education includes the sufficiency school
program in the career advancement portfolio of school personnel as an incentive, and
train school superintendents to assess schools for sufficiency school accreditation.
Thanks to using the bottom-up approach and an incentive system, the change has
expanded accordingly, and has had a chance to sustain itself.
There is a Ministry of Education policy to rotate school principals every four years
among schools. This provides a challenge to schools accredited as sufficiency-based,
since the new principal may not be familiar with SEP.
In some sufficiency schools, new headmasters often fail to continue the sufficiency
momentum, since they also want to implement their own new initiatives. When this
happened, the quality of the sufficiency movement reduced. The sufficiency spirit
was not kept up. Therefore, it is important to study the SEP educational processes that
can be sustained, and key success factors. Hopefully, this will provide guidelines of
SEP educational management for sustainability for educational institutions, relevant
organizations, and agencies both in Thailand and abroad.
2 Sustainability of School Initiatives and Interventions
Hargreaves (2007) defined sustainable education change as development, which
allows newly-evolved learning to continue and receive financial support and
resources. At the same time, the change does not negatively affect the school environment and education system. From the organizational perspective, Avery (2005)
provided three criteria to identify sustainable organizations. First, they continue to
deliver consistently strong performance. Second, they demonstrate a capacity to
endure numerous difficult economic and social situations. Third, they maintain a
leadership position in their relevant sector. Therefore, in this study, the definition of
sustainability in sufficiency-based schools is that the SEP mindset is continuously
implemented in a school. When facing a crisis such as a change of school principals who do not support SEP, the school can still maintain the cultivation of an SEP
mindset. The result is demonstrated in students’ sustained SEP mindset.
Previous studies on sustainability in school initiatives have typically regarded the
process of maintaining school initiatives as an end stage of the program. However,
waiting to build sustainability planning at the end might not provide sufficient time to
deliver effective sustainability efforts. Sustainability planning and monitoring needs
to be continuous throughout the process for it to be successful. Therefore, recent
approaches to sustainability have also called for implementing a sustainability plan
into earlier program development stages (Fagen and Flay 2009).
The change in the school may not be sustainable, possibly because of failed leadership, and pressure of other competing initiatives from external systems. Therefore,
school development should not depend on one person or one single factor. Sustainability demands the competence and involvement of the main stakeholders of the
school (Giles and Hargreaves 2006). Datnow and Stringfield (2000) suggested that
the maintenance of efforts to implement school changes depend on educators at var-