Radzi: MOE committed to ensure face-to-face school sessions throughout 2022

PUTRAJAYA: The Ministry of Education (MOE) is committed to ensuring that face-to-face schooling sessions for 2022 can be implemented throughout the year via several initiatives, including compliance with standard operating procedures (SOPs), said its senior minister, Datuk Dr Radzi Jidin.

He said his ministry would also always hold discussions with the Ministry of Health (MOH) to ensure that students could attend physical classes despite realising that there was an increased risk of COVID-19 infection.

"Sometimes, as the schools start to open and start to feel comfortable, so we have asked the state education department and the district education office to go down to the ground to ensure that the SOPs are always complied with, especially the wearing of face masks and good ventilation.

"Ventilation is another component that we always emphasise, not only in the classrooms, but also in teachers' rooms and special rooms," he told the media after the Senior Minister of Education's Aspirations ceremony, here today.

At the event, Radzi presented laptops and data plans as part of zakat wakalah contributions to 42 asnaf children from primary and secondary schools around Putrajaya.

"We always sit down to discuss and take the views of the MOH, and we are confident that with the cooperation of parents, children and schools, insyaAllah (God willing) our children can continue to attend school face-to-face for the year 2022," he said.

Meanwhile, Radzi said that the MOE's focus for this year would also be on the development of a new curriculum.

"The curriculum has its cycle and for this year's cycle, it has ended. This means that Year 6 students have completed the current curriculum cycle.

"We take into account all the views given, and insyaAllah we will ensure that the development of this curriculum will take into account, not only the views but also the conditions and environment out there, to ensure that our children are ready when they leave the education system after six years in primary school and five years in secondary school.

"By then, what has been learned will still be relevant to the current situation," he said.

In another development, Radzi said the MOE was also developing a system that records and stores school assets and utility bills in an effort to minimise wastage.

He said that during his visits to more than 277 educational institutions in the past 22 months or so, it was found that there was wastage of water, where even though schools were closed during the Movement Control Order (MCO) and there were no students, water bills still reached thousands of ringgit a month.

"We are developing a system so that all water bills are placed in one dashboard, to enable school principals and teachers to see their water bills compared with other schools, and see which schools have water bills in excess of the prescribed ratio.

"This also allows us to see what the cause is and allow us to implement more efficient interventions to make sure we can save on utility costs," he said.

Apart from that, Radzi said a more comprehensive inventory management system would be implemented to record the assets in schools, so that if there were assets that were not used in the school, they could be transferred to other schools in need.

"The results of the visits we see many ministry's assets that are not used optimally. For example, there are dozens of ovens not used that can be moved to other institutions which are in need of them to implement catering programmes.

"For damaged furniture... we have a list of schools that have excess furniture that can be moved to schools in need. So it is a more efficient asset management approach," he said.

-- BERNAMA