The New Generation School (NGS) initiative, launched by the government of Cambodia in 2015, aims to improve the quality of education including raising teaching standards; improving student performance; innovating curriculum; and introducing accountability measures. Similar to charter schools in the USA, the NGSs operate as autonomous schools and receive funding from public and private sources. One of the key objectives of the reform is to eliminate private tutoring, a widespread phenomenon that has been blamed as a contributor to the poor quality of education and an enabler of social inequalities. Using qualitative methods with fourteen respondent students from two NGSs, this empirical study found that private tutoring still persists in the NGSs for a variety of reasons: catching up with contents; the need for extra exercises; examination pressure; low quality of teaching; and lack of confidence. Positive aspects include the absence of teacher-provided tutoring, a common practice in non-NGS schools reported in previous literature. We posit that more scholarly and policy attention is needed to understand admission policies that arguably favour tutored students and could become a hidden barrier to realizing the government's promise of a "more efficient and socially equitable" education system.