MUHYIDDIN WASTE: Despite spending RM270 MIL on foreign English mentors, UPSR results dropped

Yesterday, Bernama carried an exuberant article that sang praises over what is purported to be the most outstanding results in years by our Standard Six students.

According to the Director-General of Education Tan Sri Abdul Ghafar Mahmud, the “overall performance of candidates in the Ujian Pencapaian Sekolah Rendah (UPSR) this year is the best in four years,” with the students achieving an improvement in Average National Grade (GPN) from 2.31 in 2012 to 2.27 this year (both the GPN and Average Subject Grade or GPMP operates on a decreasing scale, whereby a lower index value indicates higher achievements).

In addition, this year’s examination also saw 9.15 per cent of students scoring straight As, an increase from 8.94 per cent last year.

However, further inspection of the results shows that while the overall performance has improved, there is a visible decline in the results of the English language paper amongst national school students, with the Average Subject Grade for the paper deteriorating by 0.06 points.

Correspondingly, the number of candidates who obtained A for English dropped by 0.2 per cent, while the number of those who obtained grades B and C went down by 2.9 per cent. In fact, only 74.4 per cent of national school candidates managed to score a minimum of C this year, compared to 77.3 per cent last year.

Waste

According to news reports, Tan Sri Abdul Ghafar played down the decline in English results by saying that “the GPMP for English in government schools only decreased by 0.06 compared with last year and this is not significant.”

Unfortunately, I strongly disagree with the Education Director-General. The decline in English results is not only significant, but also shocking considering that the Government has invested heavily in recent years on the teaching of English in primary schools.

As part of the Upholding Bahasa Malaysia and Strengthening English (MBMMBI) programme, RM270 million was spent in hiring 360 foreign English language mentors through three consultancy firms, namely the British Council, Brighton Education Group and SMR HR Group.

This RM270 million mentoring programme, which ran from 2010 to 2013, was supposed to have trained 7,500 English language teachers in primary schools throughout the country. At such an exorbitant cost, one would expect that our primary school students would have at least shown a slight improvement in the English language results this year. However, the latest UPSR results are a big slap in the face to the Ministry’s efforts.

Ironically, the overall performance in the English paper amongst national-type schools saw an improvement of 0.12 points, with the number of students scoring A increasing by 4.2 per cent and those scoring B and C increasing by 2.1 per cent.

In other words, national-type schools that did not benefit from the foreign English mentoring programme managed to improve in the language, while national school results deteriorated despite the Government spending RM270 million over three years in an effort precisely aimed at improving the level of English proficiency in national primary schools.

Zairil Khir Johari

Member of Parliament for Bukit Bendera

DAP National Assistant Publicity Secretary