Announced in March 2022, the initiative targeted primary schoolchildren, with RM37.3 million allocated for a two-phase rollout.
Responding to FMT’s queries, the ministry said it has supplied 249,646 lockers to 626 schools in the first phase and 135,452 lockers to 641 schools in the second phase – a total of 385,098 lockers.
According to the statistics department, some 2.99 million pupils enrolled in government and government-aided primary schools in 2023.
“The provision of lockers to primary school pupils in two-session schools was completed in two phases,” said the ministry in a statement.
“The first phase in 2022 involved Year 1 and Year 2 pupils. The second phase in 2024 covered Year 1 and Year 2 pupils omitted from the first phase, and Year 3 pupils.”
The ministry said it remains committed to resolving the long-standing issue of heavy school bags and has introduced holistic measures, including digital textbooks, revised teaching approaches, and restructured school timetables.
It said timetables are being drawn up with three to four subjects a day, factoring in subject weighting, teacher availability, and school sessions.
It also said schools have the flexibility to adopt weekly cycle timetables, a practice already in place at some schools.
PAGE calls for transparency
Earlier, Parent Action Group for Education Malaysia (PAGE) chairman Noor Azimah Abdul Rahim had called on the ministry to explain what happened to the initiative, claiming parents have seen little follow-through since the announcement was made nearly four years ago.
Noor Azimah said there has been no clear public explanation for why the programme’s second phase, meant for older primary school pupils, appeared to have stalled.
She said parents deserve transparency on whether there was a delay, a change in approach, or a “quiet shelving” of the plan, adding that the situation reflected a broader malaise in public policy implementation.
“At this point, there has been no clear or detailed public explanation from the ministry on why the second phase appears to have stalled,” she told FMT.
“What parents are seeing is a gap between the initial announcement and on-the-ground follow-through, which naturally raises questions.
“Unfortunately, this does reflect a recurring pattern – policies are announced with good intentions, but implementation and continuity are where challenges often arise.”
The issue was also recently highlighted on social media, with parents voicing concern about the heavy weight of their children’s school bags, which one likened to “commando training” because of the physical effort required.
Many describe the “fully-packed bags” as being “almost as heavy as the children themselves”, causing strain on their young, still-developing spines.
The parents also pointed out the physical pain and long-term health risks caused by these heavy bags, and called on the ministry to implement systemic changes to what they said was an urgent and long-standing problem.