With Less than 5 Years To Go, Can We Meet our Malaysian Education Blueprint Targets?

TL;DR

In short, unlikely.

Launched in 2013, the Malaysian Education Blueprint 2013-2025 (MEB) outlines a 13-year comprehensive plan for a rapid and sustainable transformation of our education system.

With five more years to go, the MEB has achieved some successes, but is likely to come short of its targets. These shortfalls have been further exacerbated by teaching and learning obstacles brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Implementers

Meera Sivasothy, General Manager of BFM, spoke with Datuk Dr. Habibah Abdul Rahim, the former Director-General of Education and Khadijah Abdullah, the former CEO of PADU, the ministry’s Education Performance and Delivery Unit, on the five challenges of implementing the MEB and how they might be overcome.

The Challenges

1. Constant Leadership Changes

Leadership changes - not just in ministerial positions (there were at least 6 education ministers since the MEB was launched), but within the ministry’s civil service posts as well - have been disruptive. Even Dr Habibah’s own tenure as the Director General of Education lasted only 15 months. She asserts that in the long run, the ministry will have to look into how it can best carry out succession planning to maintain the continuity of leadership to effect change.

2. PADU given the Responsibility, but not the Power, to Effect Change

One of the challenges faced by PADU is the lack of authority given to the unit, which affected the speed of change. Khadijah explains that bureaucratic layers of approval for certain matters slowed PADU’s ability to problem-solve challenges, Khadijah acknowledged that some MEB targets were not achieved according to the set timeline, but there were nevertheless a lot of successes in the MEB that the country can be proud of.

3. Some Narrowing of Gaps, but Not Sufficient

There has been positive improvement in closing socioeconomic, gender and the urban-rural education gaps. However, Dr. Habibah acknowledged that initiatives to narrow some education gaps have not achieved desired goals by the set MEB timeframe, Dr Habibah says that the ultimate aim is in providing inclusive education, and an existing gap means that some children are not getting equitable access to education. “It is beyond meeting targets, but also meeting the provision of education for different groups of students,” she says.

One silver lining, however, was the District Transformation Programme, which was relatively successful in changing the role of the district education office from merely administrative, to one that supports local schools.

4. Banding of Schools Got Entangled with Rewards

A key implementation measure of the MEB was the banding of schools into different performance bands, to gauge the quality of schools. According to Dr Habibah, however, it detracted from its original purpose when it was also used to reward school teachers and personnel. People started to game the system to obtain incentives, creating charges that the measurement was not objective. Banding was thus disbanded (Editor’s note: Idris Jala, in the previous webinar in this series, indicated that banding of schools was critical to the improvement of the Malaysian schools.

5. COVID-19 Made Things Worse

As the pandemic stretches on, children’s education must continue, whether in school or at home. This brought about an exacerbation of learning and achievement gaps that were already in existence within the education system. Dr. Habibah explains that COVID-19 tested the readiness of home-based learning, particularly for younger children, and those requiring support for special needs education. She says that these changes will have implications on how the ministry reassesses and proceeds with the delivery of the MEB.

The BFM Take?
Like Vision 2020, we have to face up to the fact that MEB targets are not likely to be achieved by 2025. Let’s reset the targets in the MEB for a 2030 outcome, add in a Covid-contingency plan, but otherwise leave the MEB objectives and targets intact. We also need to reinstate the banding of schools into performance categories, decoupled from financial rewards, so that we know whether we are making progress or not.

Full webinar can be found here: https://bit.ly/DGeducation

About the Webinar Series

This webinar series, “Malaysia’s Education Challenge: Seeking Solutions” is a collaboration between Edunity Foundation, G25 Malaysia and BFM Media. More information on this series can be found at https://www.edunityfoundation.org/upcoming-webinars

Image Source: Ivan Aleksic, Unsplash.com