A TOTAL of 48,636 Year One pupils failed to master basic reading, writing and arithmetic skills in 2025, highlighting the continuing challenge of ensuring children acquire foundational learning skills.
Deputy Education Minister Wong Kah Woh said the figure was lower than the 76,262 pupils recorded in 2023 and 49,677 in 2024.
He attributed the decline to the introduction of the Early Literacy and Numeracy Detection initiative and the Year One Intervention Programme in 2024.
“The Education Ministry guarantees that no pupil, particularly those from low-income or hardcore poor households, will be left behind in accessing quality education, regardless of their socioeconomic background.
“The ministry has therefore introduced various ongoing initiatives through targeted interventions as a long-term plan to narrow achievement gaps among pupils nationwide,” he said in the Dewan Rakyat today.
He was responding to Mohd Kurniawan Naim Moktar (BN-Kinabatangan), who asked about strategies to reduce the number of hardcore poor children facing long-term educational exclusion.
Wong said the government was also implementing the District Transformation Programme (DTP), which focuses on narrowing gaps in Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) examination results based on location, gender and socioeconomic status.
In 2025, targeted interventions under the programme covered 744 schools and 41,817 SPM candidates across six core subjects.
The initiatives helped narrow the gap in average SPM grades between urban and rural schools by 32.9% compared with 2012, he said.
The gender gap in SPM certificate eligibility also narrowed, from 5.95 percentage points in 2024 to 5.32 percentage points in 2025.
Meanwhile, the proportion of rural SPM candidates qualifying for a certificate rose to 92.90% in 2025, up from 92.31% the previous year, Wong added. - October 28, 2026
