KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia needs an Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Service and Skills (Ofsted) to regulate and monitor the quality of early years and children’s social care services.
Childhood care and education expert Professor Dr Sopia Md Yassin says focus should first be given to Ofsted’s responsibility in inspecting childcare centres and teacher training programmes.
She urges the government to emulate Ofsted’s model in the United Kingdom.
Ofsted is a non-ministerial department of the UK government. It reports directly to Parliament, Sopia says, and its reports are free of bias.
She says the organisation’s reports and rating of centres are public and uploaded online.
“It gives some kind of assurance that the childcare centre you are looking at has a certain level of quality.
“Every time parents want to send their child to a school, they can check the website to see its rating, whether it’s satisfactory or not.
“In return, this will motivate childcare centres to work hard to move up the ladder.
“It is not easy to obtain an outstanding or satisfactory rating, thus, they would have to do a lot to be better.”
Sopia, who retired from the National Child Development Research Centre of Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris in September, says Malaysia has something similar to Ofsted, called the Permata Negara Quality Assurance System (Permata Q).
Launched in May 2017 by Datin Seri Rosmah Mansor, wife of the then prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, Permata Q’s purpose was to evaluate the effectiveness of the Permata Negara curriculum implemented by government-run nurseries and those registered with the Welfare Department.
It was introduced to ensure implementation of Permata Negara’s curriculum was consistent with the concept, philosophy and criteria set by Permata.
Rosmah, who was Permata patron, had said Permata Q had six standard quality components to ensure it was a comprehensive and complete assessment that covered management, learning, assessment, baby care and human resources.
“The Permata Q system is also aimed at benchmarking nurseries to determine their quality,” Rosmah had said.
Sources close to the programme say funding was stopped last year.
They say this made it difficult to carry out work.
“It made it difficult for inspecting officers to do their job as they needed to travel from one nursery or kindergarten to another. No work could be done in the end,” one source says.
Sopia urges the government to empower Permata Q and emulate Ofsted so that it can play a big role in the Malaysian childcare system.