RADIO station BFM 89.9 recently collaborated with G25 Malaysia and Edunity Foundation in hostng a couple of webinars on school education, where speakers discuss issues related to the outcomes of the Malaysia Education Blueprint, a 10-year vision with two years to go before expiry.

As expected, the discussions revolved around making schools better at getting a better academic performance out of the students. By no means am I belittling the event organisers’ efforts. These are important issues that should be discussed at length by the public.

However, it is easy to overlook the fact that schools have an important part to play in monitoring and helping keep school children healthy. The fact that our laws require all children to attend school for a minimum of nine years essentially means that they spend a significant amount of their formative years, when biological and psychological growth and developments are at their most vigorous and crucial, under the supervision of teachers and school staff.

With the extremely low ratio of approximately one teacher to 11 students, it makes perfect sense for schools to play a role in tracking children’s growth, development, and health conditions longitudinally, and to act as a proxy of healthcare institutions to offer non-medical interventions whenever the need arises.

The high accessibility of the schools to the public also means they are an efficient channel through which essential resources such as nutrition can be delivered.

The delivery of healthcare via the school system is not a new concept in Malaysia.

In 1967, a joint school health programme between the Health Ministry (MOH) and the Education Ministry (MOE) was implemented to carry out health appraisal and treatment of minor ailments, including deworming; record height and weight; screen for hearing and visual defects; identify children with special problems; immunisation; emergency care and first aid; and health education, guidance and counselling.

After it was incorporated into the maternal and child health programme in 1971, a joint committee between the MOH and the MOE was established to enforce its implementation.

Around the same period of time, the Applied Food and Nutrition Programme (AFNP) was implemented, coordinating efforts from various ministries, including the Ministry of National and Rural Development and had the ministries related to Health, Education, Agriculture and Information involved in delivering various food programme such as the school feeding programme, r, supplying subsidised milk and free nutritious meals to primary school children.

These programmes continue to run until today. In fact, just this year alone, the government has increased its budget allocation for RMT to RM420 million in Budget 2021.

On the other hand, our national education philosophy clearly lists physical and emotional wellbeing as one of the core purposes of our public education.

In addition to mandatory health and physical education in the school curriculum, the MOE has also run the programme Satu Murid Satu Sukan (one student one sport) for years.

With much efforts, resources and funding being perennially channelled into our school systems, are we satisfied with the outcomes delivered by these programmes?

In 2019, the Unicef special report found that about 22% of children below age five in Kuala Lumpur’s low-cost housing schemes are stunted and 15% of them are underweight.

On the other end of the scale, Malaysia is among the top three countries with a high percentage of obese children (six months to 12 years). In the 2015 NHMS, 11.8% of children below 18 were found to be obese. In 2019, the figure increased to 12.7%.

Meanwhile, health education in our schools might have not been effective in inculcating students with the right attitudes towards health.

According to the NHMS 2017, one in 25 secondary school students had used drugs, 3.4% were still using drugs. 10% of students smoked, 10% of them drank alcohol, 6% reported drunkenness. It showed 7.3% had had sex but only 12% of them had used a condom.

The National Action Plan for Nutrition of Malaysia III (2016-2025) gave us an insight into what could have impeded the outcome of these programmes.

First of all, there seems to be an inadequate coordination among the agencies and government departments involved:

“Despite periodic meetings of the National Coordinating Committee on Food and Nutrition, the multi-sectoral commitments in nutrition still need to be strengthened. Nevertheless, governmental coordination is also fundamental between national and subnational levels. Strong political commitment is required to ensure the collaboration from various sectors. This will facilitate the implementation of this plan.”

Secondly, the plan also suggested that there may be a lack of continuous assessment and monitoring of the nutrition situation.

If years of data on the students’ health collected by the schools are not used as feedback for impactful actions, then these data are just redundant. Data collection and statistical analyses have little meaning if not used to guide corrective intervention or policy changes.

Lastly, school administrators as well as teachers must not forget that they have important roles to play in facilitating the delivery of healthcare and support to our schoolchildren that goes beyond merely collecting and documenting the students’ health profiles.

Let us not forget that all these worrying figures represent the state of our children’s health before the emergence of Covid-19. 

The issue of health has never been more pertinent than now as the Covid-19 pandemic and prolonged lockdowns have greatly affected many people, particularly those in the B40 group, for more than a year. Programmes administered through the school system have also been put on hold as a result.

Consequently, many children are and will be at a higher risk of going hungry or facing new health challenges.

For the sake of the health of our children and the general public, it is important for the new government and its agencies and departments to take serious steps to increase the functionalities of the machineries in the system and support our schools so that they quickly become more effective and efficient at delivering healthcare to schoolchildren. – September 13, 2021.

* Chan Yit Fei is a founding member of Agora Society. He is a cellist and educator by profession, and a biotechnologist by training. He writes to learn and to think, and most importantly, to force himself to finish reading books that would otherwise not see much of the light of day.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.