Post Covid-19 education dropout crisis

SHAH ALAM - A total of 100,000 to 500,000 students in Malaysia dropped out of the education system post-Covid-19 pandemic.

A non-governmental organisation (NGO) Untuk Malaysia in a statement on Friday said that pre-Covid-19 pandemic, the World Bank recorded close to 175,304 primary school students in Malaysia were categorised as ‘educationally poor’ in 2019.

The NGO that fought for the quality of education in Malaysia said, the term ‘educationally poor’ was used by the World Bank to refer to the group of students present at the school however, they failed to read and comprehend while they were at the age of 10.

"The report approximates one per cent of children aged seven to 12 were not in schools.

"This meant 31,154 children in Malaysia had dropped out of education,” it said.

The statement said the World Bank uses the metric ‘Average Learning Based on School Year’ to evaluate the quality of education throughout the world.

It said that based on the metric, the average schooling duration for students in the country is expected to drop by 1.24 years.

"It meant the ‘Average Learning Based on School’ in Malaysia was at 7.65 years today.

"If the situation is true, Malaysian children only receive quality education for seven and a half years compared to 11 years of schooling which was a deficit of up to three years of quality education.

"The reality today is for every 100 students registered for the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM), 18 of them would fail,” it said.

The statement said the SPM dropouts were only a portion of the several other types of dropouts in other education.

Untuk Malaysia took the initiative to produce the 2023 Malaysian Education Dropout Document based on the definition of the types of dropouts.

"Two years ago. Malaysia was poised to become a country with a high economic income in 2024, but the country still records a dropout of one million every decade,” it said.