National Education Blueprint: First Report Card Released

1. RM 11.87 million for Tamil schools
2. Tamil classes at 60 national schools
3. First Tamil cluster school

National Education Blueprint 2006-2010 was launched by YAB Dato Seri Abdullah bin Ahmad Badawi on 16 January 2007. The blueprint, which lays the foundation for education development over a five-year period, has six trust – nation building, developing human capital, strengthening national school, bridging the education gap, improving the teaching profession and accelerating excellence at educational institutions.

The Education Ministry said that it would release a report card twice a year on its progress and implementation. As such the first report card on the progress achieved in the first six months after the implementation of the National Education Blueprint 2006-2010 was released by the ministry on 3 July 2007.

The recently released report card consisted of 3 aspects namely infrastructure development project, introduction of new policies and implementation of programs and its achievements.

Infrastructure development project

The Ministry of Education received RM23.198 billion under the Ninth Malaysia Plan to carry out 16,735 infrastructure development projects. The report card revealed that as of June this year, 2816 out of a total of 16,735 projects have been completed while another 1,823 are under implementation. Another 12,096 projects were at planning stages.

The education ministry also recognizes that schools of different streams are important, being the basis of unity and country’s economic development. As such vernacular schools (Tamil schools and Chinese schools) as well as community religious schools and state religious schools have been given due priority.

9 Chinese schools have been given the green light to relocate to areas with a high Chinese population and the applications for the building of two new schools have also been approved.

In the case of Tamil schools, SJK(T) Ladang Sungai Salak Siliau, which has been squatting at SJK(T) Bandar Springhill, has been given permission to relocate to Lukut. The ministry is in the midst of upgrading several Tamil schools throughout the country.

The ministry in the 9th Malaysia plan has also allocated RM100million to upgrade partially aided schools. As of June 2007, RM73.57 million have been allocated to Chinese Schools, RM7.08 million for Tamil schools, RM 11.87 million for mission schools and some RM733,000 for religious schools.

The ministry also acknowledged that some planned projects had not been carried out fully due to some difficulties in acquiring suitable sites and locations.

Strengthening existing policies and introducing new policies

The education ministry has introduced several policies since 2006 in order to increase the quality of education. Strengthening national schools has been one of the important policies introduced in the education blueprint. In order to attract more non-Malay children to national schools, Mandarin classes have been offered at 100 schools and Tamil classes at 60 schools since January 2007. In the report card it was stated that 1908 students in SK schools learn Mandarin whilst 668 students take up Tamil. It was further elaborated that the two languages would be introduced to other national schools in 2008.

The ministry has set aside RM6,114,000 to tackle disciplinary problem among students. Affirmative actions have been taken to reduce disciplinary problems among student with the cooperation of all ministries and government agencies. As a result, disciplinary cases among students have been reduced from 2.27% in 2007 to 2.10% in June 2007.

The report card also revealed that the education ministry agreed to increase the participation of Malaysian students in the International schools not more than 40% of their enrolment. It was aimed to generate growth among International schools besides drawing foreign investors to this country.

Emphasis has also been given on integrating student for unity. Therefore Student Integration Plan for unity (RIMUP) and E-Integration at school have been introduced by the education ministry. RM25,879,620 have been allocated to carry out various programs to enhance unity among races in a systematic way.

Programs implemented

Under the trust-narrowing the education gap between urban schools and rural schools, greater emphasis was given to improve the quality of education among the rural students. For this purpose an additional RM2.6 billion have been allocated to upgrade facilities such as school buildings and computer labs at rural schools especially in Sabah and Sarawak, to train teachers by setting up two teachers training institutes, to provide financial assistance to poor students and to provide an additional allowance to teachers serving in the rural schools. It was targeted that 2.2 million students from 67% primary schools and 38% secondary schools which are located in the rural areas to benefit from these efforts.

In March 2007, Cluster school concept was introduced as a way to realize the trust-accelerating educational excellence among the students. Therefore 30 cluster schools were selected from different groupings and they were given autonomy in certain areas. SJK(T) Simpang Lima, Klang was the only Tamil school selected as a cluster school.

Some 88 schools were reactivated as smart schools to ensure they become the model for other schools. The smart schools are equipped with ICT facilities to carry out teaching and learning activities more efficiently. So far the smart schools were provided with 123,725 computers and 3,025 access centres. A total of 247,804 teachers were provided with ICT training.

Various steps were taken to strengthen the teaching profession between January to June 2007. It was found that the condition of entry into teacher training had been tightened in order to recruit highly qualified and committed teachers, coaching and mentoring programs for principals had been introduced and various super principal/teacher schemes also had been introduced.

On developing human capital, the education ministry has introduced Standard Assessment Forms to minimize non-uniformity of students’ co-curricular marks for entry into public universities. Besides that, Young Entrepreneur Progam was introduced in the schools to provide guidance and skills to students pertaining to entrepreneurship. School cooperatives are being strengthened for the benefits of students.

As the report card system has been set as a bench mark and indicator for the continued development of our education system, we hope that steps taken by the Malaysian Education Ministry in monitoring and strengthening its plans and programs will ensure that all students receive a balanced and equal education in time to come.