31/01/2010
By KAREN CHAPMAN, TAN SHIOW CHIN and TAN EE LOO
The Government Transformation Programme (GTP) road map aims to raise Malaysia’s education standards to world-class level.
THE education chapter in the Government Transformation Programme (GTP) The Roadmap is a comprehensive document which promises to improve student outcomes across the school system and to enable access to quality education for all students.
Improving student outcomes is crucial to developing a more competitive workforce as Malaysia pushes towards becoming a developed nation by 2020.
Based on the experiences of the world’s top-performing school systems, there are four imperatives to improving student outcomes.
These are to:
·Ensure every child succeeds: Set the same high expectations for all students (regardless of background) and provide systematic help and support for children who fall behind;
·Hold schools accountable for changes in student outcomes: Provide autonomy to schools in exchange for significantly improved student outcomes;
·Invest in great leaders for every school: Invest heavily in principals and head teachers as the primary drivers of change via rigorous selection, extensive training and robust performance management based on student outcomes; and
·Attract and develop top teachers: Increase attractiveness of the profession to recruit the most talented people, enhance quality of practical training, and put in place rigorous performance management and continuous professional development.
The roadmap (on the education chapter) states that the Government’s emphasis are on pre-schools, literacy and numeracy, high performance schools, and a new deal for head teachers and principals.
Students
To achieve higher enrolment rates and a better quality of pre-school education, the Government has identified seven areas to strengthen the governance and delivery of high quality pre-school education.
There will be a national committee on pre-school education under the Education Ministry, with a pre-school division to govern all pre-school providers.
The permanent committee members will include the Education director-general, heads of major government pre-school providers such as Community Development Department (Kemas) and National Unity and Integration Department (JPNIN), as well as the head of the private education division of the ministry. Among the issues the committee would oversee are curriculum, qualification requirements, training and evaluation.
Presently, there is no one ministry or agency that fully handles matters related to pre-school education.
The National Pre-School Curriculum Standard has been developed to ensure the level of standard and consistency among the schools.
It incorporates the principles of holistic education and includes activities to promote understanding among the different races.
Targeted training programmes will be offered to both teacher and teacher assistants to improve the skills of approximately 30,000 existing and new staff over the next three years.
For newly-hired teachers and teacher assistants, the minimum qualification requirements will be elevated to graduate and Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) level respectively.
The roadmap also recommends that children aged four could be enrolled for pre-school classes when they are available in 2012, as such classes have a positive impact on their long-term development.
TThe government also hopes that all children will have acquired basic literacy and numeracy skills after three years of education.
Research by the Education Ministry reveals that one factor that contributes to drop-out rates is the inability of students to cope with the syllabus being taught.
In 2008, almost 32,000 students dropped out of school at various stages.
“Starting early is crucial as it becomes harder to compensate for deficiencies in literacy and numeracy skills as a child grows up.
“Being literate and numerate will enable our children to be more productive and participate fully in their community and wider society,” states the roadmap.
Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin announced earlier this month that the ministry had decided to introduce a new literacy and numeracy screening programme (Linus) for Year One pupils. Effective this year, these pupils would be monitored and subsequently tested after two months on where they stand on these skills.
The aim, he added, was to ensure pupils mastered the three R’s — reading, writing and arithmetic — after three years of primary schooling.
To underline the seriousness of the matter, the roadmap states that student-screening will be done three times a year in March, June and September, to help identify those who do not meet the relevant standards.
Students will then be placed into the Linus programme or into a special education programme if they have a learning disability.
Given the shortage of teachers with expertise in teaching basic literacy and numeracy, intensive training of teachers will take place so that they can effectively deliver the learning modules.
Intensive monitoring and supervision will be conducted on the bottom 10% of schools by officers in the state and district education departments as well as the ministry’s inspectorate of schools and quality assurance division. Reports will then be produced twice in 2010 to track the progress of children in the programme.
Schools
High-performance schools will be rewarded with benefits aimed at allowing them to excel further and reach higher performance levels.
These include financial incentives for schools, school leaders, teachers and non-academic staff; a greater range of options for human capital development; and allowance for high-achieving students to advance faster through the education system.
The roadmap states that these incentives consist of an annual allocation of RM700,000 per school, and RM1,000 and RM700 for school heads, teachers and non-academic staff in secondary and primary schools respectively.
Options for school heads include sabbaticals and a wider range of professional development programmes tailored to individual needs.
Parents of top-performing students would be given the option of allowing their child to complete the relevant syllabus in a shorter time period.
“These students could bypass Year Two by covering 50% of its syllabus in Year One and 50% in Year Three,” states the roadmap.
Muhyiddin who is also Education Minister, had announced the list of 20 high performance schools on Monday.
He said of the 20 schools, 10 were fully residential, four secondary and six primary, adding that another 30 schools would be named next year, and 50 by 2012, making it 100 in total.
Before a school is awarded the status, it will need to meet stringent criteria that take into account its academic achievement, strength of its alumni, international recognition, and network and linkages with external entities.
The roadmap states that the high-performance schools were included as part of the Education NKRA to raise their quality, create places for the very brightest students and develop a model for other schools to emulate.
“We will raise the quality of the best-performing education institutions by increasing their level of autonomy in running the school and requiring an increased degree of accountability for student outcomes in return,” states the roadmap.
The trust school is a new initiative under the roadmap, which are government schools that will be jointly managed by private sector partners and Education Ministry school heads.
According to Education deputy director-general Datuk Noor Rezan Bapoo Hashim, these private sector partners can be either companies or individuals.
“What the Prime Minister wants is to catalyse the corporate culture into the school system,” she told StarEducation.
In general, these companies or individuals will be expected to endow the school they choose with a certain amount of money in the form of a trust or foundation.
But more than that, they will help to set up KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for the school, and have a say in the management of the school in order to achieve them.
The indicators need not necessarily be academic in nature.
For example, if a school has a low attendance rate, the main KPI might be just to raise the attendance rate by a certain percentage.
Noor Rezan said the companies or individuals interested in participating in the initiative will have to undergo a vigorous selection process by the Education Ministry.
“We have to be careful as we are ‘giving’ our babies away,” she said.
“It’s not just about money, they must have the children’s education at heart; they must know about education.”
The private sector partners can indicate which schools they are interested in, or alternatively, the ministry can suggest a few schools for their consideration.
Unlike high-performance schools, trust schools will comprise schools of all levels of performance.
The schools themselves will be consulted before the final agreement is made.
In exchange for the extra funding and greater autonomy, the school leadership must in turn be willing to work with the private sector partner and adopt certain corporate practices.
For example, teachers who do not perform can be told to tranfer out of the school, while qualified non-government servants can be hired as teachers on a contract basis.
Teachers at the selected schools will be given the option whether they wish to stay in the trust school or not.
But Noor Rezan hopes that teachers will take up the challenge as it will be “worth their while”.
The partnership will be formalised in a five-year contract between the ministry, the company or individual, and the school.
The contract will provide for either party to pull out of the agreement if the other side does not fulfil their part of the deal, said Noor Rezan.
A new section has been recently set up in the ministry to handle the trust school initiative, and the soft launch is expected to be early next month.
The first batch of trust schools and their partners will operate from next January.
School heads and teachers
Both financial and non-financial rewards will also be given to school heads who exceed targets.
These consist of a payment of RM7,500, accelerated promotion and a certificate of recognition.
An attachment programme with a reputable local or overseas institution will be offered to those who significantly exceed targets for three consecutive years.
This is part of the new performance management approach (new deal) that would apply to all school heads in government schools from this year.
Teachers in schools with heads who qualify for the reward will also be eligible for a financial reward.
The top 5% of teachers in the school will receive RM1,800, the next 90% receives RM900 while the bottom 5% will not be eligible for the reward.
School heads will categorise teachers into these performance bands.
The roadmap states that there is a need to invest heavily in school heads as they are the primary drivers of change to upgrade the school system significantly.
Positive impact
“Research has found that an improvement in the performance of school heads has a significant positive impact on student outcomes,” it states.
Based on an a simulation of past performance, it is estimated that about 2% of school heads would be eligible for the reward under the programme.
The eligibility criteria for the reward include a specified target composite score, or target improvement in their performance rankings.
“This would give school heads a chance to receive the reward regardless of their starting point; even those with lower starting positions will be able to receive the reward if they show significant improvement in their rankings,” states the roadmap.
Other criteria require the school head to have had a conduct that is free of any disciplinary action, have an annual appraisal report score that is higher than 90 and an unqualified financial audit report from the state’s education department.
Approximately 10% of the low-performing school heads will be identified based on the lowest composite score.
In the first year, these school heads will undergo the Institut Aminuddin Baki Performance Management Programme where specific plans will be drawn up to improve the performance of their school.
If the situation continues for a second year, they will be given coaching and mentoring support by qualified officers.
However if it is ineffective, they can be transferred or offered voluntary separation.
In the third year, the school head would be transferred to “another function” where he would be on probation for two years; by the fifth year, he would be in “pooling” for an administrative attachment at either the district education office, state education department or ministry; and by the seventh year, he would be permanently in a pool post and offered VSS.
On another matter, the performance of all 9,900 government schools will be ranked on a yearly basis and published from this year.
“By publishing the information, we hope to encourage engagement with the public and ensure that parents know how schools actually perform. Transparency will also motivate the schools to raise their performance level,” states the roadmap.
http://thestar.com.my/education/story.asp?file=/2010/1/31/education/5571681&sec=education