More eyeing Chinese schools

BUMIPUTRA student enrolment in Chinese schools have risen by more than 50% over the last 10 years, says the Education Minister.

Fadhlina Sidek said enrolment figures had risen from 11.67% in 2014 to 18.52% in 2024.

Non-Bumiputra students enrolled in the same schools had declined from 88.33% to 81.48% in the same period, she said.

“The trend is the same for national public schools. Bumiputra student enrolment increased from 93.81% to 95.12% while registration of non-bumiputra students dipped from 6.19% to 4.88% from 2014 to 2024.

“Tamil schools saw little change. Bumiputra student enrolment only went up from 0.38% in 2014 to 0.49% in 2024, while non-bumiputra student enrolment maintained at over 99% throughout the 10-year period,” she said in a written reply.

The minister was responding to a written question from Chow Yu Hui (PH-Raub) who asked for statistics on the number of students enrolled in national, Chinese, Tamil and international schools across the country.

On international schools, she said as of May, there were 88,951 students attending international schools here. Of the number, 59,726 (67.1%) of the students were Malaysians while 29,225 (32.9%) were non-Malaysians.

“This represents a 34% increase in Malaysian students attending international schools from 2019 to 2024. Bumiputra student enrolment in these schools have increased by 49.4% while the number of non-bumiputra students attending international schools have also increased by 30.6%,” she wrote.

Separately, Fadhlina said that 3,062 public schools in Malaysia have less than 150 students. These schools, classified as low enrolment schools or better known as SKM (Sekolah Kurang Murid), include 626 Chinese schools, 383 Tamil schools and 2,053 national schools across Malaysia.

To address this, Fadhlina said schools with less than 30 students have joint classes, comprising all students from Year Two and up to Year Six.