Thumbs up for effort to improve education system

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KUALA LUMPUR: Teachers in the country have given the ‘thumbs up’ for the government’s efforts to introduce elements of creativity, innovation and living skills into school curriculum to meet the demands of current needs.“This is what we have been asking all these years and are glad that the government has responded positively to the idea,” said Lok Yim Pheng, the secretary-general of the National Union of Teaching Profession (NUTP), the country’s largest teachers union with 160,000 members.

She was commenting on the announcement by Education Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin that the government intended to transform the country’s education system to provide quality education.

She told Bernama yesterday that for the idea to be effectively implemented, the government should first consider the welfare of the teachers, in that they should be “freed from the burden of unnecessary paper work and allowed to concentrate on just teaching.”

For this, the union has proposed that the government introduce teacher assistants in schools, in the ratio of one such assistant to 500 pupils.

She said that teacher assistants could take care of the clerical work like filling up countless forms and other ‘chores’ like chaperoning pupils to sports meet and accompanying them to hospitals or clinics when they fall sick in schools.

She pointed out that currently teachers were bogged down with “a lot of paper work and mundane chores which took up too much of their valuable teaching time.”

Lok said another aspect that the government should consider was to upgrade the Information Technology (IT) systems in schools and link them to district, state departments and the ministry of education.

“What is happening now is that teachers are being asked to supply the same informa-tion separately to the district, state education departments and education ministry.”

Lok said the union had been asking the government to allow teachers to concentrate on teaching and help them to enhance their knowledge, competency and capabilities so that they could provide quality education. — Bernama