Primary Schools Comparison

I think we need to move on from the previous post, despite the record number of comments. I've been slowly reading through the new Education Blueprint and I want to start by examining the number of primary schools, in particular comparing the national primary schools and the national type primary schools.

For those who are not familiar with some of these statistics, let me lay them out. The number of national primary schools have increased from 4844 in 1990 to 5761 in 2005, an increase of 19%. In comparison, the number of national type Chinese primary schools (SRJK) have actually decreased from 1288 to 1287 in the same time period. The number of national type Tamil primary schools (SRJT) have decreased from 538 to 525 in the same time period. In other words, funding for new primary schools for the past 15 years have gone almost exclusively to national type schools. (There might have been some new Chinese primary schools built e.g. Wawasn or Vision schools and relocated Chinese primary schools such as Pei Chai and Tropicana)

In the same time period, the enrolment in national schools have increased from 1.8 million in 1990 to 2.4 million in 2005, an increase of 35%. Enrolment in national type Chinese primary schools (SRJK) have also increased by 11% in the same time period, from 580,000 to 650,000. Enrolment in national type Tamil primary schools (SRJT) have also increased, but only by less than 3% from 96,000 to 99,000.

While one can justify the increase in the number of national primary schools because of the large increase in the number of students enrolled in them, it is much harder to justify the lack of an increase in the number of national Chinese type primary schools given that enrolment in these schools have also increased. To think about it another way, there have been an increase of 70,000 students in the national Chinese type primary schools with no increase in the number of schools. While this 70,000 number doesn't seem large given that it amounts to roughly 50 additional students in each of the 1287 schools, it is important to realize that overcrowding in national type Chinese primary schools is a serious issue.

The new Education Blueprint also provides the number of low enrolment schools or 'Sekolah Kurang Murid (SKM)' which it classifies as schools with less than 150 students.

There are 1642 SKM for the national primary schools, 530 such schools among the national Chinese type primary schools, 329 such schools among the national Tamil type primary schools.

So what I did was to estimate the number of students enrolled in these SKM schools and take away these from the total enrolment of students in each type of school - national, Chinese and Tamil. I then divided these numbers by the number of schools for each type minus the number of SKM schools. I wanted to do this to get a sense of the average number of students per school for the schools with normal enrolments.

What I found was the following - There are approximately 520 students per school for the national schools, approximately 750 students per school for national Chinese type schools and approximately 250 students per school for national Tamil type schools. (not including the SKMs)

When I examined the number of teachers per school type (including the SKMs since the data doesn't distinguish between number of teachers in SKMs and non-SKM schools), I found that the average number of students per teacher was 20 in national Chinese type primary schools versus 16 in national schools and 14 in national Tamil type schools.

I don't know about our readers, but I find this situation at least a little lopsided. Shouldn't those tax-paying parents who send their kids to national Chinese type primary schools at least be given their fair share of government expenditure at the primary school level? (I'm not even going to discuss the situation at the secondary and university level yet)

Perhaps, I'm making a lot out of nothing given that the results that are being produced at the national Chinese type primary schools are still pretty good despite the large number of students per class (many over 50 and some even over 60 in certain areas). (One should remember that approximately 60,000 or 10% of the student enrolment in these Chinese type primary schools are non-Chinese students so I'm not only talking about Chinese parents)

But is the current situation of an increasing number of students in Chinese type primary schools but without any increase in the number of Chinese type primary schools sustainable? How many of the SKM Chinese type schools can one 'transfer' to urban areas where demand continues to be high?

Lastly, I think that Tamil schools have the most to worry about in the sense that these schools are the most poorly resourced and have the least amount of government as well as community support.