EXISTING education policies and programmes for Orang Asli children need to be improvised and better curated to fit the social and cultural context of this community, said a research policy paper published by IDEAS Malaysia. 

The research, titled Education Policies in Overcoming Barriers Faced by Orang Asli Children: Education for All, was authored by Wan Ya Shin, IDEAS’ research manager for the social policy unit.

Faced with socioeconomic, geographic, language and cultural barriers, many Orang Asli children perform poorly and drop out of school, said Wan. 

She added this was because there are gaps between the policies and programmes with the implementation on the ground. 

“Key challenges such as lack of opportunities to attend pre-school and contextualised curriculum and pedagogy have not been adequately addressed,” she said during a webinar on “Indigenous Children’s Access to Education: Before & During Covid-19” hosted by Ideas this morning.

Wan said these significant challenges have resulted in persistently higher school dropout rates from the national average. 

Orang Asli children make up 4% of the national student population in 2015, according to statistics by the Education Ministry.

The enrolment numbers of Orang Asli pupils have hovered around 38,000 to 41,000 from 2011 to 2017.

However, the enrolment rates are not reported in the Malaysia Education Blueprint Annual Reports, so the percentage of Orang Asli children not attending school, could not be ascertained. 

If the population had been growing throughout these years, then the enrolment rates would have been declining, especially when there was a slight drop in the enrolment numbers from 2015 to 2017, the research paper said.

“For example, from 2016 to 2018, the national dropout rates were consistently below 4%, while the Orang Asli pupils’ dropout rates were above 17%, and it increased significantly to 26% in 2017.” 

However, Wan said there was a lack of data when it comes to completion and enrolment rate among Orang Asli children.

While there are some results and success from the programmes, she said there is still a large proportion of pupils who have not mastered basic literacy and numeracy skills. 

“Challenges reported highlight the prevalent issue of large class sizes, the remoteness of the schools and additional workload problems with implementation and execution,” she said. 

The other main issues highlighted in all these programmes were lack of local and indigenous context and inadequate training for teachers, she said.

“Although all these programmes aimed to customise the syllabus of the modules to the local context, they have not been entirely successful due to the inadequate training and resources for the teachers,” she said.

“Teachers are the important enablers in these programmes, but many studies have highlighted that teachers do not receive the support and training needed to teach these modules,” she added.

Moreover, Wan said some teachers assigned were not trained to teach these subjects, and this created an additional challenge for them to provide quality teaching for Orang Asli pupils.

“It is based on the teachers’ and lecturers’ initiatives to improve on the learning of the Orang Asli students, as this is an additional responsibility they take on,” she said.

Since 1995, the ministry has introduced various policies and programmes to improve the educational outcomes of Orang Asli children. 

These have evolved from integration into mainstream education to a more indigenous-focused education.

Special Programme for Orang Asli Students, Pensiangan-Salinatan Programme, The Integrated Curriculum for Orang Asli and Penan Schools, Orang Asli and Indigenous Parents Adult Class Programme are among programmes the government had developed throughout the years for Orang Asli children.

However, the paper concluded that further action was needed to ensure these policies matched the nature and scale of challenges faced by Orang Asli. – October 23, 2020.