KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 18 — Enrolling urban poor children in boarding schools from Primary One onwards could give them a better shot at continuing their education, which would help lift them from the vicious cycle of poverty, PKR MP Nurul Izzah Anwar said today.

The federal opposition lawmaker called for the set-up of full residential schools to start from the elementary level instead of waiting till secondary school, saying this facility would provide a “supportive environment” to poor students in the city to help them get past the primary level UPSR assessment tests.

“Look at MARA, for example, you have a set of students but they had to survive the primary level first to get to MARA. I think that’s not the right concept, you should actually be targeting the lower-income areas and providing them from the word go,” the Lembah Pantai MP told Malay Mail Online today, referring to the MARA Junior Science Colleges or fully-residential secondary schools.

Fully-residential primary schools for the urban poor will ensure they are equipped with skills to get to the next level and subsequently be able to move up socially and economically, the PKR vice president said.

Nurul Izzah said she had in the past raised issues such as school dropouts and the use of English as a medium of instruction to the Ministry of Education, adding that she expected to present her boarding school plan to the ministry by this March after collecting feedback from educators.

“I have been writing consistently to them but this particular idea we are going to push forward with a proper holistic solution after consulting with the teachers, maybe by the next Parliamentary session,” she said, adding that a plot of land has already been identified in the Bangsar South area in her constituency.

Earlier, Nurul Izzah said in a forum that the Bangsar South area reflected Malaysia’s workforce where around 80 per cent had only graduated from secondary school with SPM qualifications or had lesser qualifications, which would restrict their ability to earn more.

She said students from the urban poor could eventually qualify for tertiary education if they were given a conducive environment in the form of fully-residential primary schools.

Nurul Izzah had given the anecdote of how seven Form 3 students that last year failed their exams were able to score As in up to three subjects after several months of coaching by teachers, saying that this proved that there was a way forward and that the students were actually craving for attention and the space to learn.

She was responding to a question from Dr Hamisah Zaharah Hasan, a Universiti Putra Malaysia academic who was present in the audience and had been conducting a study on youths in Bangsar South.

Hamisah, the head of UPM’s Department of Communication, said that she found that over 50 per cent of youths and their parents in that area were only SPM graduates.

Hamisah had asked what kind of occupation would these youths be able to take on and how the cycle that they were in could be resolved.

Hamisah later told Malay Mail Online that her team’s study on marginalised youths in Bangsar South is part of an ongoing larger three-year study by various local universities that is headed by Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.

Nurul Izzah was a speaker at the “Derita Orang Bandar: Punca dan Penyelesaian” (Suffering of Urbanites: Source and Solution) forum, with her three other fellow speakers being Malaysian Muslim Consumers Association chief activist Datuk Nadzim Johan, Malaysian Trade Union Congress president Khalid Atan and Umno Youth deputy chief Khairul Azwan Harun.