By Debra Chong
KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 2 — The Education Ministry is putting early childhood education as its priority, noting the biggest challenge is to provide enough quality teachers, its minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin said in Parliament today.
Among its grand plans to improve the curriculum for kindergartners is to boost by 50 per cent the length of time for them to “interact” using English, Muhyiddin, who is also the deputy prime minister, stressed.
Other measures include carrying out continual checks and supervision in pre-schools; giving the private sector incentives such as tax cuts; and building 4,000 more pre-school classes by 2012 to cater to the growing number of pre-school pupils.
Muhyiddin foresees the pre-school pupil intake growing by 20 per cent in the next three years.
He noted the present enrolment of five-year-olds into both government-run and private preschools was slightly more than 340,000.
The most important thing, the minister said, was to improve the quality of pre-school teachers, which his ministry would carry out through special post-graduate and professional training courses.
“If we want to start teaching them from an early age, we need quality teachers ... who are teachers with degrees,” said Muhyiddin.
Earlier during question time, Abd Rahman Bakri (BN-Sabak Bernam) had asked the education minister about the government’s plans to include pre-school learning as part of the national education system.
He also wanted the minister to answer why some parents failed to send their kids to pre-school despite the readiness of government-operated centres such as Kemas and Perpaduan.
Muhyiddin told him it may be hard for parents staying in rural areas to reach the schools in town but he hoped that the ministry’s new initiatives would help reduce the problem.
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