Good Grades For Brunei In Education Equity

Good Grades For Brunei In Education Equity
By Azlan Othman

Bandar Seri Begawan - A global ranking on education equity recently released by UNESCO has placed Brunei 36th out of 129 countries surveyed.

In its 2009 Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report launched last week in Geneva, UNESCO placed Brunei and Malaysia are on a list of 56 countries with a high EFA Development Index (EDI).

Brunei scored an EDI of 0.972, Total Primary ENR of 0.974 and Adult Literacy Rate of 0.946.

Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam were not included in the report, along with the United States and Australia. Kazakhstan was on top, followed by Japan, Germany, Norway and the UK. Last year's report saw Norway in first place, while the UK topped the list in 2006.

The annual Global Monitoring Report, available at www.unesco.org, is a means of monitoring countries' progress toward achieving six EFA goals, set in 2000, by 2015.

The EDI is a composite that uses four of the goals, excluding the first and third, selected on the basis of data availability. The universal primary education goal is measured using the indicator of total primary net enrollment (NER) — the percentage of primary school-aged children who are enrolled in either primary or secondary school; while the quality of education goal is measured using the proxy indicator of the survival rate to fifth grade.

The EDI can vary from 0 to 100 per cent, or 0 to one when expressed as a ratio. The closer a country's EDI value is to the maximum, the greater the extent of its overall EFA achievement and the nearer the country is to the EFA goal as a whole.

The current national development plan (2007-2012) and the Brunei Vision 2035 emphasise the accomplishment of a well-educated, highly skilled society with a world-class education system that promotes lifelong learning as its hallmark.

To meet the needs of the 2V century, the SPN 21 was introduced by the Ministry of Education and will be phased into the country's schools in 2009, accompanied by new and revised assessment procedures to measure achievement.

Various education plans ranging from teaching science in English as early as in Primary One, increasing the number of schools, raising the number of students entering the science stream, boosting the participation rate in higher education and technical route are taken by the Ministry of Education.

The plans include having more schools and upgrading the facilities of existing schools as well as increasing the number of secondary schools by about 40 per cent (11 new secondary schools and eight primary schools) in the next five years. This is to meet present and future needs. -- Courtesy of Borneo Bulletin