The supported children are selected by the Social Services team who investigates the families, thus the beneficiaries of our programmes are the most impoverished. Once selected, the child is educated at the remedial center of PSE or in a local state school, according to his/her academic level.
Remedial centre
The discovery that on the dump-site, or round about, there were thousands of children who were not going to school, or who had stopped, because they did not have the means, caused us to open the Remedial Centre in May, 1996. Many of these children, too old to be re-integrated into the education system, needed to catch up rapidly, so that they would be in a position to help their families as quickly as possible.
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Accelerated education for 1200 children
As the object was to catch up on their delayed schooling, we proposed an accelerated education system of two academic levels a year. Today, more than 90% of the children have got into the rhythm and many have attained level 9 in the space of five years. The full time teaching, unlike in the state school system, aims to give each child a solid grouding in Khmer, mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc., and foreign languages (French and English), essential for a country with an important tourist industry.
Priority is given to a lively, active teaching style, and sporting and artistic activities take an equal part in the programme.
At present, all levels are given at the Remedial Centre which follows the Government curriculum. The students take the official exams where the rate of success in Brevet (The Certificate of General Education) and the Cambodian Baccalaureat is remarkable (more than 90% pass regularly).
State schools
When the children are neither academically behind nor seriously at risk, but simply excluded from school for the sole reason of poverty, PSE, not wanting to substitute for the Government when solutions already exist, supports the children in the local State schools.Today more than 3,500 children are educated within 30 state schools. PSE pays for the cost of the teaching (supplementing the teachers' salaries), uniforms, school materials, healthcare, sandwiches for some of them, and compensation for the money which they no longer give to their families because of going to school.
But when PSE sends thousands of children to the State schools, they suffocate under the numbers of students, with classes sometimes of more than 90 pupils. To allow them to accept all of these children, we had to construct, in accordance with the Municipal Education authority, several large buildings for supplementary classes. Healthcare centres, toilets, libraries, are all part of the agreed investments by PSE, following the terms of an agreement which defines the participation of each of the associates (Education Authority, Direction of Schools, PSE).
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