Najib holds the GTP and ETP report. — Bernama photo
KUALA LUMPUR: The government’s initiatives to improve the quality of education under the Education National Key Result Areas (EDU NKRA) have effected a transformative change in the basic elements of the education system in Malaysia, Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin said.
Muhyiddin, who is also Education Minister, said there had been an increasing number of high performing schools and a reduction in the number of lower performing school since the start of the GTP.
“Our initiatives have worked because we have made honest appraisals of the shortcomings in the previous regime and because we have had the courage to make those changes required of us,” he said as quoted in the Government Transformation Programme (GTP) Annual Report 2014.
The report said Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) had been one of the key components of the EDU NKRA since the start of GTP and to promote ECCE enrolment, fee assistance had been given to low income households to help offset the cost of private pre-schools and childcare centres.
By the end of 2014, children aged 4+ to 5+ enrolled in pre-schools rose to 84.26 per cent, while the number of children aged 0-4 enrolled in childcare centres, to 9.71 per cent.
In building quality teachers, the report said work in 2014 was primarily focused on assessing all teachers and school leaders using the new Unified Instrument (UI) to establish baseline competency, as part of the pre-implementation phase in view of the roll out in 2015.
As part of the agenda to develop a comprehensive Continuous Professional Development (CPD) framework for teachers, the CPD master plan was developed and distributed to all teachers.
In 2014, a total of 24,467 teachers attended competency development courses for Grade 41, which aimed at improving their teaching standards as well as management capabilities to improve classroom delivery.
In raising the level of schools and improving student performance, the District Transformation Programme (DTP) and High Performance School (HPS) Programme were implemented.
The two initiatives worked together to ultimately improve the conditions in schools towards a more conducive learning environment for its students – the first by empowering local authorities to identify weak schools and deploy help to them, and the second by creating incentives for schools to work towards cultivating a high-performance culture.
The measure of success for the DTP was determined by the number of schools that progress into high performing Bands and by the number of schools that move out of the lower Bands.
In 2014, the number of schools in Bands 1 and 2 increased by seven per cent to 3,105 (31.03 per cent) schools from 2,891 (28.99 per cent) in the previous year.
The HPS initiative, on the other hand, operates on the basis that schools which turn in strong student performances are on the right track and should be recognised for their achievements.
HPS schools are rewarded with both financial and non-financial incentives to help them maintain their standards of performance. — Bernama