Malaysia performs abysmally in education rankings list
The
state of Malaysia’s preschool education is poor despite efforts taken to turn the country into a high-income generating economy, according to a study on global preschool systems.
Malaysia is ranked 36 out of 45 countries researched under an early education study commissioned by Singapore’s Lien Foundation. The republic doesn’t do very well either in this study prepared by the Economist Intelligence Unit, placing only seven places above Malaysia. Other countries that performed worse than Malaysia were China, South Africa, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia.
The report, entitled “Starting Well - Benchmarking early education across the world”, score countries based on the presence of well-defined guidelines, covering children’s basic education, care, and cognitive and intellectual needs. It also considers whether there are adequate mechanisms to monitor and enforce this.
Europe dominated the Index, taking all but four of the top 20 positions, losing those rankings to Nordic countries like Finland, Sweden and Norway.
The report found that high-income countries were not the best providers of services, despite having a high average per capita income. Like Singapore, Australia, Canada and the United States suffered poor rankings due to the inadequate reach of preschool programmes.
Malaysia, like the other nations which ranked lowly, were slow in taking basic steps to provide a preschool environment. One of the important factors in ensuring accessibility was to enforce a minimum level of preschool as a legal right for children. For example, Japan, which ranked 21 in the index, has a high quality preschool programme, but does not back this up with a legal right to such education. Based on the report, the right to attend preschool does not imply that it is mandatory; this means that governments have the obligation to provide these services to those who want it.
Countries which did poorly in study also faced problems from the effects of increased global migration, a trend that has led to a rise in the number of immigrant children missing out on taking part in educational systems. Affordability is an important factor in determining if a nation scores well, as shown in this example . In 2010, the tuition and lodging at China's top higher learning institution, Peking University ,was about RM300 per month, thanks to government subsidies but preschools charge close to RM2,000 per month due to fewer grants for preschool providers and underprivileged families.
The group of global experts behind the report recommends that policymakers must invest in their people as early in life as possible as they increasingly compete on the basis of talent and human capital. This means that governments have to ensure that high quality preschool education is affordable to all segments of society.
Development of human capital must also be prioritised ahead of infrastructure and technology. The report also highlighted the vital role that parents still need to play in their children’s education and development. At the same time, governments need to work on efforts to raise the standards of teaching profession in their respective countries.
Other recommendations include reducing student-teacher ratios in classes and ensuring good health and safety measures in preschool services, plus incorporating lessons on preservation of local cultures.
