Dissecting the Malaysian Education Blueprint — Access to Success.

Exploring the first pillar of the Malaysian Education Blueprint 2013–2025; on the accessibility of the MEB.

5 min readNov 21, 2020

To recap, our previous article [1] provided an overview of the Malaysia Education Blueprint (MEB) [2] 2013–2025. There, we detailed its objectives and the five aspirations for the Malaysian education system.

The MEB says that “every Malaysian child, regardless of wealth, ethnicity or background, deserves equal access to a quality education that will enable the student to achieve his or her potential.” Here we focus on the first system aspiration — the accessibility of the education system.

According to the MEB, the Ministry of Education (MoE) aims to achieve universal enrolment across all levels from preschools to upper secondary (Form 5) by 2020.

How accessible is the Malaysian Education System today?

We evaluate the accessibility of the Malaysian education system by looking at:

Enrolment rate from preschool to tertiary education level (2013–2018)
Attrition rate (2010–2017)

Enrolment rate

The enrolment rate is a straightforward way to measure the accessibility of the Malaysian education system: The higher the enrolment rate, the more accessible the education system.

Overall, the Malaysian education system is remarkably more accessible compared to in 2013. The enrolment rate has increased across all levels from preschool to upper secondary when comparing between 2013 and 2018. Of all education levels, the lower secondary level has recorded the largest improvement in enrolment rate. This is followed by upper secondary, preschool, and primary school (Figure 1).

Though the MEB does not focus on the enrolment rate of post secondary and tertiary education levels, the enrolment rate for both education levels has also increased marginally over the same time period.

Figure 1: Enrolment Rate from Preschool to Tertiary Education level

Enrolment Rate

The enrolment rate in primary education in 2013 was a good 94%. By 2018, we achieved near-universal enrolment at 98%. This can be credited to the 2002 amendment of the Education Act 1996 [3]. The amendment made six-year primary schooling compulsory by 2003. Although the MEB has planned to increase the compulsory years of schooling from 6 years to 12 years, the policy suggestion has yet to be tabled at the time of writing.

However, the primary education enrolment rate has not grown as quickly as the other levels of education. This indicates that there could be a group of hardest-to-reach students who are struggling to access education. New legislation on their own is not enough. The government must intervene to provide these students with the necessary facilities and resources required to obtain a quality education.

Although the MoE is still yet to achieve full enrolment based on the latest available data, it is still possible to achieve this target. Extra efforts are required to enrol the remaining hardest-to-reach population of children, especially those living in rural areas.

Attrition rate

Here, we use the number of out-of-school students to cross-check the progress in accessibility in the education system.

As of 2011, the MEB indicated that the attrition rate among primary school students was around 0.2%. There was no mention of the attrition rate of other education levels. Unfortunately, there is not enough available data on the attrition rate among primary and secondary school students. We gauge the attrition rate by proxy using the information provided by UNESCO regarding the number of out-of-school children and adolescents.

Attrition Rate

According to UNESCO’s data for sustainable development goals, the number of out-of-school children has declined significantly from 122,105 in 2010 to 10,381 in 2017. This number has remained relatively constant in recent years. Meanwhile, the number of out-of-school adolescents has increased from 188,126 in 2010 to 205,877 in 2017. The reasons for this remain unclear. However, a UNICEF study [4] on Sabah’s out-of-school students offers some explanation. In the study, the majority of respondents cited the following reasons for not attending school:

In decreasing order of significance:

Financial reasons
Gender-based reasons
Parental apathy
Lack of resources for Alternative Learning Centres (ALCs)
School accessibility.

What all this means

Our review shows that the Malaysian education system is on track to achieving universal enrolment from primary school to secondary school in the coming years. However, we are cautious in our optimism towards this government goal. Many key policies that could potentially boost access to education are far from fruition. For example, the MEB proposed that lower and upper secondary education should be made compulsory by 2015. As of writing, this policy has not yet been tabled.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted access to education. To break the COVID-19 chain, the MOE announced [5] that all national examinations are postponed and that most schools will be closed from 9 November 2020 until the end of the academic year. Meanwhile, all form 2 and form 3 students will be learning online [5] until March next year.

In this time of COVID-19, ensuring universal access to education means more than having 100% enrolment at all education levels. It is now also about ensuring students’ access to digital education. Many students do not have access to the technology or infrastructure required to engage in productive online learning. Whilst the Budget 2021 [6] has introduced some measures to improve access to digital education, we believe that those measures are still insufficient.

Conclusion

The COVID-19 pandemic has made access to education more unequal. To ensure that students can continue their education during this time, we have increasingly digitised it. While no one would question the importance of providing continuous education to our children, we must consider if some students might be left behind. Many students from infringed communities are struggling to engage in remote learning.

In line with the MEB aspiration to achieve universal access to education, it is high time for the government to continue the ‘Zero Reject Policy’, which is already evident in enrolling 10,000 special needs children in schools. They must make sure that all students have access to digital learning, regardless of their backgrounds. This could be achieved by making the internet more affordable, providing students with laptops, and ensuring that teachers have proper training to conduct effective online lessons.

Whilst it is important to ensure every child has the right to a quality education, we shall not let quality be the cost for quantity. In our next article, we will focus on reviewing the quality of Malaysian education system based on the goals set by the MEB.