A/HRC/44/40/Add.3 (vi) Strengthening Teacher Quality (vii) Enhancing School Leadership Quality (viii) Engaging Parents and Community to Create a Learning Ecosystem • Expanding the Involvement of the Private Sector as a Strategic Partner in Education. • TIMSS: TIMSS 2015 has shown improvements compared to TIMSS 2011: (i) TIMSS 2015 showed an improvement in Mathematics with an increase of 25 points that made up the 465 average score; (ii) Malaysia is among 18 countries which showed an increase in achievement in Mathematics (25 score points); (iii) TIMSS 2015 again recorded an improvement with an increase of 44 points that made up the 471 average score; (iv) Malaysia has shown the highest increase among 16 countries that showed increases in Science (45 score points); (v) In Mathematics, there were increases of 1% for advanced Level, 6% for High Level and 9% for Intermediate Level. (vi) In science, there were also increases of 2% for advanced Level, 10% for High Level and 18% for Intermediate Level. • PISA: (i) Malaysia’s performance in PISA 2018 has shown a significant improvement in all of the three literacies assessed which are Reading, Mathematics and Science. This is evident in the increasing number of students obtaining Proficiency Level 2 and above compared to our students’ performance in PISA 2009 and PISA 2012. 54% of students attained at Level 2 proficiency or higher in reading. (ii) Some 63% of students in Malaysia attained Level 2 or higher in science while 1% of students were top performers in science, meaning that they were proficient at Level 5 or 6. (iii) Some 59% of students in Malaysia attained Level 2 or higher in mathematics while 2% of students scored at Level 5 or higher in mathematics. (iv) The mean mathematics and science performance in 2018 lay above the performance observed in 2009, when the country first participated in PISA, and in 2012. In reading, performance in 2018 was close to that observed in 2009 but better than that observed in 2012. Improvements were observed, in general, amongst both high- and low-achieving students; but improvements in mathematics were particularly strong amongst the country’s highestachieving students: at the 90th percentile, performance improved by about 17 score points per 3-year period. Paragraph 44 Malaysia should increase investment in support for low-income students, improve access to education in rural areas, prioritize funding for school infrastructure maintenance and repair, and improve the overall quality of education. The government should ensure that non-citizen children can benefit from public education, and regulate and certify informal education programs for children who fall through the cracks. It should withdraw its highly problematic reservations to articles 2 and 28 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, pertaining to non-discrimination and universal primary education. The government should make secondary education compulsory. Comments from the Government of Malaysia: • Malaysia has made reservations on Article 28 (a) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) which requires the State parties to provide free primary education to all children regardless of their citizenship status. Malaysia upholds the reservation because all 22