KUALA LUMPUR: The National Union of Teaching Profession (NUTP) yesterday proposed to the Health Ministry to handle the obesity issue among schoolchildren by deploying nurses to schools to record students’ body mass index (BMI) periodically.
Its president, Hashim Adnan, said the task to record the BMI of students should be left to nurses as they were more knowledgeable in the health business.
“We propose that nurses to be allowed to come to schools periodically so that they can explain to students about the importance of health and record the BMI of the students,” he told reporters after chairing the 9th NUTP executive councillors meeting here yesterday.
Hashim said if the task was left to the nurses, it could free the burden of teachers in having to do this.
Meanwhile, NUTP secretary-general Lok Yim Pheng said that NUTP also opposed the decision made by certain schools to adapt the Primary School Standard Curriculum (PSSC), which increased the learning period to 52 hours per week (1,380 minutes) from the current 46 hours.
“If the learning period is increased, it is feared that it will give problems to the students as they will have less time to rest or play because they have to stay longer at school,” she said.
Lok also said NUTP hoped that schools would not increase learning hours without prior approval from the authorities so that the students would be able to undergo a healthy growing up process and develop creative and innovative mindsets.
On students’ assessment system, she said NUTP had been deluged with complaints from teachers who had to prepare students’ assessment forms manually as the computerised software for the purpose had yet to be completed.
“The teachers have to prepare the 18-page assessment form for each subject manually because the programmeis not yet in place and this is a very troublesome task for the teachers,” he said.
Lok also hoped that the education ministry, especially through the Malaysian Examination Board, would speed up the process to improve the information and communication technology (ICT) to enable the teachers to carry out the computerised assessment on their students. — Bernama