The quality of education has always been of public interest globally. Quality education should begin at the entry point of preschool programme. Policy documents chart the policy target and direction for individual country. However, the highlight of preschool quality issues in this form of documents have been minimally assessed. The study aimed at evaluating the emphasis of Malaysia policy documents towards the topic of preschool quality and examining the issue of structural quality elements in these documents. Seven policy documents on education quality in Malaysia, consisting of four macro policy documents and three preschool specific documents were examined. The data were analysed qualitatively by using content analysis. It is found that quality education in general was mentioned repetitively in all four macro policy documents , i.e., Shared Prosperity Vision, 11th and 12th Malaysia Plan, and Malaysia Education Blueprint (MEB). However, there were fewer mentions on specific quality of early childhood care and education (ECCE), childcare, and preschool education across these documents, except MEB. Similarly, structural quality was found to be less mentioned than process quality in all three preschool specific documents examined – 1) National Standard Preschool Curriculum, 2) National Standard Preschool Quality, and 3) Guideline on Preschool Management. Thus, future research is worth directed towards examining the policy implementation of structural quality rather than process quality of preschool education, particularly in Malaysia settings.
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In-Text Citation: (Nazir et al., 2023)
To Cite this Article: Nazir, N. A., Harith, N. H. M., & Samad, S. A. (2023). A Summative Content Analysis on Malaysia Policy Documents of Preschool Quality. International Journal of Academic Research in Accounting Finance and Management Sciences, 13(2), 933–945.
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