Abstract:
This research aimed to study the application of co-production in the educational services of municipal schools in Trang Province by reconciling the role of key actors in educational administration and the concept of co-production to find suggestions on how to increase the efficiency of local educational service delivery under the co-production technique. The research data were collected from four municipal schools in Trang province by analyzing data from three different sources: First, education policy documents from the Ministry of Education, Department of Local Administration, and Trang municipalities including school action plans. Second, school observation during working hours and finally, in-depth interview with 15 representatives of the municipality, school administrators, teachers, and 8 representatives of a community member, parents, and students from November 2019 to January 2020. The results may be summarized as follows: (1) The various sectors in Trang Province have cooperated in providing educational services in municipal schools. The key producers in this process are the government, Trang municipality, and schools, while school boards, government officials, community members, monks or religious organizations, merchants, parents, alumni, students, and other private sectors are classified as co-producers. In the process of co-initiation and co-delivery, school boards, monks, merchants, alumni, and students have high participation while community members and school boards have medium participation in the co-design process and finally school boards have low participation in the co-assessment. (2) The above result shows that school boards play a role in all processes because municipal schools in Trang province apply the School-Based Management for Local Development program that pays attention to school boards as an official body established by law. Therefore, due to the influential position of school boards, this collaboration is classified as collective co-production. As can be seen from the above findings, the problem in implementing the co-production concept in a municipal school in Trang Province is due to the unequal role in the co-production process, which has focused almost exclusively on the school board as a formal entity. This leads to the recommendation that 1) informal participation of all stakeholders should be supported in both individual co-production and group co-production to reflect the genuine demands of community members. 2) active citizenship of parents and students should be encouraged, including cultivating attitudes and understanding of the core value of co-production among all teachers, to support and create a high level of participation in the co-production process and respond to the genuine demands of citizens in the community.