Make early screening available to every Malaysian child

DEVELOPMENTAL disability or delay in children is common. Most good studies show that between 10% and 15% of all children have a disability. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention quote that one in six children has a developmental disability, with rates rising over the past two decades.

Comprehensive Malaysian data on the rates of various childhood disabilities like intellectual disabilities, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorder, specific learning disabilities (eg: dyslexia), physical disabilities (eg: cerebral palsy and spinal muscular atrophy), deafness, and blindness, is lacking. However, data from the Education Ministry (MOE) shows that the problem is large. For 2024, the MOE reported that 122,000 Year One students (about 24% of all children for that age) lacked the essential skills of reading, writing, and counting. After remedial support via an intervention programme for literacy and numeracy, many gained the skills – but more than 59,000 (11.8%) were still not able to read or were numeracy illiterate.