Articles

First wave of education blueprint initiatives to be implemented by mid-April

Published by SchoolAdvisor | Jan 30, 2013

The first four initiatives of the National Education Blueprint 2013-2025, to be introduced by theMinistry of Education within the first 100 days of the year, are supposed to benefit students aswell as school principals and teachers.As part of the first of eleven ‘shifts’ to transform the education system, the ministry will firstintroduce School Improvement Partners (SI Partners) Plus and School Improvement SpecialistCoaches (SISC) Plus in Kedah and Sabah to start improving teaching of the subjects of BahasaMalaysia, English and mathematics. These two programmes will provide direct training toteachers of these subjects.The second initiative is to use the Cambridge Placement Test to evaluate 70,000 Englishlanguage option teachers, after which they will be divided into three categories. Training willbe given to teachers who are below the required proficiency level. According to the educationminister, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin, the ministry has the capacity to train 5,000 within these first100 days.The third initiative is Parent Engagement, aimed at building awareness, support systems andgaining cooperation from parents in 10,000 schools. The fourth will be the launch of the e-Guruvideo, which will be watched at all schools. An e-Guru video library will be created this monthas a portal through which the e-Guru videos will be launched.The videos’ content is expected to educate teachers on the best teaching methods that canbe employed in the classroom. The long-term expectation is that this will improve teaching ofscience, technology, engineering and mathematics.These initiatives are meant to fulfil the first part of the first shift in the Education Blueprint, tobenchmark the learning of languages, mathematics, and science to international standards.They are meant to give Malaysian students a strong grounding in the foundation skills forfurther learning and key growth areas for the Malaysian economy. According to the ministry,they will be especially beneficial for schools in bands five, six and seven (schools that have poorperformance or are underperforming).The aims of the Education Blueprint 2013-2025 are to level the playing field for all students andbring better access to education to all Malaysians. According to the preliminary report of theEducation Blueprint, Malaysia’s high levels of sustained investment in education have resultedin significant progress in improving access since independence.Malaysians now have almost full access to primary education and there have been significantimprovements in access to secondary education, but there is still room for improvement,especially in terms of equity.The question that remains is whether the current initiatives under the Education Blueprint andthe ones to follow – including building high-order thinking skills among students – will be trulyeffective.