PUTRAJAYA: The Education Ministry is closely monitoring 402 schools nationwide which have been identified as having disciplinary issues among its students.
The issues include involvement in crime, bullying and truancy.
Deputy Education Minister Datuk Chong Sin Woon said from the total, 311 schools have high disciplinary issues and 91 schools are under the 'hotspot' category.
"Last year, a total of 111,895 students had disciplinary problems, 95,046 of whom were secondary schools students while 16,849 were from primary school.
"Statistics showed that 2.03 per cent of students were involved in disciplinary issues from 2012 to 2016.
"Truancy is the main disciplinary issue among our students," he said.
He said the ministry has set a key performance indicator (KPI) to reduce such problem to 0.02 per cent from the current KPI of 0.4 percent
Chong, however, declined to divulge the names of the schools.
He was speaking to reporters after chairing the ministry's committee meeting to address disciplinary issues among school students.
Chong also gave his assurance that bullying cases in schools are not severe, with an average of 0.06 per cent recorded in the past five years.
In 2013, a total of 4,120 bully cases were recorded; 2,906 cases in 2014; 3,011 in 2015; 3,448 in 2016 and 872 cases were reported as of June this year.
"The perception that bullying cases in the country are on the rise is not true. Such a perception happened because of the various videos of bullying incidents in schools which went viral on social media.
"From our investigation, those videos are old but made their rounds again. Our checks also showed that some bullying videos were from neighbouring countries but many mistook the video as having occurred in Malaysia," he said.
He said the ministry has reminded state education departments, district education offices and schools to take necessary measures to address disciplinary problems among students.
Among the measures include increasing focused intervention such as holding a meeting with police; local councils and district education offices; forming a task force to solve such issues; engaging with the community and parents in student self-development; and through counselling programmes in schools.