MALAYSIA ADOPTS TWO-PRONGED TEACHER EDUCATION STRATEGY TO PURSUE EFA

KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 18 (Bernama) -- Malaysia, as a staunch supporter of the Education For All (EFA) agenda, is adopting a two-pronged teacher education strategy -- recruitment and rewarding teachers - in its pursuit to realise the EFA agenda.

"Apart from recruiting qualified teacher education candidates, we also need
to ensure that in-service teachers remain motivated to serve," Education
Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said Thursday.

In sharing Malaysia's best practice on teacher education at the plenary
session of the 8th High-Level Group Meeting on Education For All in Oslo,
Norway, Hishammuddin said Malaysia was cognizant of the need to sustain
investment in qualified and motivated teachers as they were key to improving the
quality of its education system.

Hishammuddin, who is also an executive board member of the United Nations
Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco), said the world needed
18 million teachers to be trained and recruited by 2015.

The challenge was the need to strike a balance between quantity and quality
of teachers produced and the short-term need for teachers and the longer term
goal to build a high quality teaching force, he said in a statement here today.



To ensure quality, the selection of candidates for teacher education
programmes in Malaysia involved stringent measures.

He said that in line with its efforts to improve the quality of education
for the indigenous people, the academic qualification of teachers serving in
remote schools was upgraded.

Several teacher training colleges were also selected to be the centres of
excellence for indigenous education.

Hishammuddin also said that Malaysia would support the formation of an
international task force on "Teachers For EFA", a voluntary global alliance of
EFA partners working together to address the "teacher gap" issue.