It has just been announced by the Education Ministry that the move to make English a compulsory pass subject in the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) examination, due to take place beginning next year, has been postponed.
This follows the postponement of the Science Practical Examinations for Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Additional Science, which had also been scheduled for implementation in this year’s SPM.
According to an official statement, the postponement was to enable all related parties, including teachers and students, more time to get prepared, besides “ensuring school facilities and laboratory equipment nationwide meet the standards set before the examination could be carried out.”
Arbitrary decision-making
While flip-flop decision-making is almost synonymous to our education system, this sudden postponement reveals two worrying things.
Firstly, it shows how our education policies are constantly decided upon in an arbitrary manner without considering important issues such as readiness of the system, capacity of teachers and students to adopt and adapt to changes, as well as the state of the existing infrastructure.
In the past, we have seen how hastily introduced policies, such as the Teaching and Learning of Science and Mathematics in English (PPSMI), had to be reversed when it was found to be counter-productive because teachers could not teach well in English. Similarly, the controversial School-based Assessment (PBS) was also revamped and had most of its major elements removed after three years of botched implementation.
Clearly, not much thought is put into policies before they are carried out.
More than RM1 billion spent on English training
Secondly, the postponement of English as a compulsory pass subject for SPM is an admission that the government has failed to improve English standards despite spending more than RM1 billion in the last few years to do so.
In place of the abolished PPSMI policy, the government had introduced a policy called Upholding Bahasa Malaysia and Strengthening the Command of English (MBMMBI), which seeks to make our students fluent in both languages. This policy, introduced in 2012, is allocated RM200 million a year from the ministry’s budget.
On top of MBMMBI, the government has also spent RM454 million in the last five years to import foreign English language mentors to train our English teachers. This programme began in 2010 with RM270 million spent to hire 360 foreign mentors for three years, and was extended in 2013 for two years at a cost of RM184 million.
In total, the government has spent more than RM1 billion over the last few years on specific programmes to improve the standard of English in our schools. This does not even include other expenditure in teacher training.
Thus, having spent such an extravagant sum of money, why is it that the Ministry of Education is not confident of our students passing English?