KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 15 — An opposition lawmaker today slammed the government for the decline in English proficiency in the recent UPSR results, despite spending hundreds of millions of ringgit on training English teachers in primary schools.

DAP’s Bukit Bendera MP Zairil Khir Johari (picture) said it was “shocking” to see the level of decline in the national average performance of students in the subject when the government has spent RM270 million to hire 360 foreign English language mentors under the Upholding Bahasa Malaysia and Strengthening English (MBMMBI) programme.

“This RM270 million mentoring programme, which ran from 2010 to 2013, was supposed to have trained 7,500 English language teachers in primary schools throughout the country,” he said in a statement today.

“At such an exorbitant cost, one would expect that our primary school students would have at least shown a slight improvement in the English language results this year,” he added.

Education Ministry Director-General Tan Sri Abdul Ghafar Mahmud yesterday revealed that the overall performance in English dropped 0.06 points on the National Grade Point Average (GPMP).

This took into account a 2.9 per cent decline in the number of students scoring grades A to C, while those scoring grades D and E went up by 3.0 per cent when measured against last year’s results.

Comparatively, vernacular schools saw their GPMP for English improve by 0.12 points, propped up by an improvement of 2.1 per cent in the number of students scoring grade A to C, and a dip of 3.0 per cent in the number of students scoring E.

Zairil said the result is especially jarring for the government, since national-type schools were not part of the MBMMBI programme.

“National-type schools that did not benefit from the foreign English mentoring programme managed to improve in the language, while national school results deteriorated despite the government spending RM270 million over three years in an effort precisely aimed at improving the level of English proficiency in national primary schools,” he said.

The teaching of English in national schools has long been a sticky issue, with the government having overturned an earlier policy to teach science and mathematics in English, otherwise known as PPSMI, in 2009 after six years in use at both primary and secondary levels.

The government instead pushed forward the MBMMBI programme, in what was seen as a bid to appease PPSMI proponents and parents who were livid over the policy flip-flop, while at the same time pacify those who were staunchly for using only Bahasa Malaysia in all subjects for all schools in the country.