Stephen Ornadel is a consultant in the telecommunications industry.
I’ve just had the delight of spending five days in Siem Reap – Cambodia’s main tourist hub, perfectly situated for the temples of Angkor Wat and others. As you would expect for Asia, it is an exciting, bubbling city, that is experiencing massive growth powered by tourism and a fair chunk of Chinese investment (you only have to see the brand-new airport to appreciate the scale of that).
Cambodia is an autocracy, and the new Prime Minister just happens to be the son of the former Prime Minister, who was in power for over 30 years. Whilst that might not sound ideal, it remains a wonderful country to visit. However, this article isn’t about tourism but rather ambition. It is about parents’ universal desire to give their children better opportunities than they had.
I am writing this article in the context of the Labour Party’s decision to add VAT to private school fees and to significantly increase business rates and employer’s National Insurance, both of which also impact private schools. Declaration, I won a scholarship to a now-defunct private school (Carmel College) and sent both of my sons to local comprehensive schools.
This article is about a girl called Srey Leap. But before talking about her, I’ll start with her parents. They are the proprietors of the local coffee stand, down the road from Tropical Breeze, the lovely family-run hostel I stayed at. Her parents have owned Ma Ma Coffee for around 10 years.
There isn’t so much to it. It is a basic stand that sells tea and coffee with limited physical assets to the business. Nonetheless, they put any branch of Starbucks to shame. The amount of business they conduct is phenomenal, and it was very obvious that they have a huge amount of goodwill in the city.
Each morning, I sat at the stand watching the comings and goings, enjoying my iced coffee, together with some fried pastries from the neighbouring stand. During each thirty minutes I spent there, dozens of scooters pulled up to collect their regular drinks. Whilst Mum was focused on preparing the orders and taking payment, Dad was constantly brewing more coffee, topping up ice, tea, water etc. The tasks never stopped, all efficiently managed with the most rudimentary and challenging facilities.
On my final day in Siem Reap, I bought some coffee after a day trip and was served by someone truly special – the aforementioned Srey Leap. She proudly told me that in Khmer, her name means “Lucky You”. She is indeed very lucky.
Despite her family’s humble means, Srey Leap attends a private Khmer school six days a week from 7 AM to 12 PM. She doesn’t attend a state school – she explained not because it is poor quality but because one of the benefits of attending private school is that she can squeeze more into her day. Two to three afternoons a week, she helps out on the coffee stand.
Every weekday, she attends English school from 5 to 6 PM. She loves English and she excels it. She started learning it from the age of 6. She also attends Chinese school, six days a week, for 1.5 hours each lesson. The English and Chinese school are private establishments too.
By the way, if you are wondering what happens at her Khmer school after 12 PM fear not – there is an entire second sitting in the same premises – a different intake, with different teachers and a different principal. This is standard in Cambodia.
I didn’t get to ask Srey Leap about VAT on school fees in Cambodia. I did ask her about relations with Thailand and Vietnam – she understood the question but in common with most 15-year-olds, politics wasn’t her thing! But she did tell me that her 28-year-old sister pays for her Khmer and Chinese school fees (she is one of four siblings) and that her parents fund her studies at the English school.
So, here in the UK, we are witnessing the Labour Party’s politics of envy – placing obstacles in the way of parents, exercising their free will, to give their children the education of their choice. Meanwhile, in developing world Cambodia, in an autocracy, we see parents having the freedom to exercise their own choices for their own children, without their government placing obstacles in their path – whatever the obvious personal sacrifice.
The role of a government should be to encourage and support ambition – rather than bringing everyone down to the lowest common denominator.
