Orang Asli Education

ADVANCING THE ORANG ASLI THROUGH MALAYSIA’S CLUSTERS OF EXCELLENCE POLICY
Mohd Asri Mohd Noora Sultan Idris University of Education
ABSTRACT:

Since gaining independence in 1957, the government of Malaysia has introduced various programmes to improve the quality of life of the Orang Asli (aboriginal people). The Ministry of Education, for example, is committed in providing education for all including the children of Orang Asli. However, whilst the number of Orang Asli children enrolled in primary and secondary schools has increased significantly over the last decade, the dropout rate among them is still high. This has been attributed to factors such as culture, school location, poverty, pedagogy and many more. The discussion in this article is drawn upon findings from fieldwork study at an Orang Asli village in Johor, Malaysia. This article discusses efforts in raising educational attainment of the Orang Asli through the implementation of the Clusters of Excellence Policy. In so doing it highlights the achievement of the policy and issues surrounding its implementation at the site.

Introduction
Malaysia is one of the Newly Industrialised Countries (Bożyk, 2006) and ranks 28 in term of GDP per capita and 21 in term of ease of doing business (The World Bank, 2010). It is one of the most multi-ethnic and multi-religious countries in Southeast Asia (Brown, 2005) with a population of 1 28,717,780 of which 65% are Bumiputeras , 26% Chinese, 8% Indians, and 1% other ethnic groups (Department of Statistics Malaysia, 2012). Whilst it is not the intent of this paper to engage in a detailed discussion of the history of Malaysia, even in the earlier works of key figures in the field of comparative and international education—such as Sadler (1900), Kandel (1933) and Hans (1959)— there has been an emphasis on the importance of examining “educational phenomena within the broader socio-political contexts in which they occur” (Crossley, 2000, p. 321). Hence, in our attempt

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