As schools reopen steadily over the coming weeks, education recovery will prove to be perhaps more vital than ever in the pandemic period. Phase 2 of the Learn From Home Frog School lessons, launched in February 2022, comes at an opportune moment to assist in facilitating inevitable gaps resulting from school closure. The partnership between CIMB Foundation, Teach For Malaysia (TFM) and YTL Foundation exemplifies how organisations are able to achieve more through collaboration.

The idea first came about in mid-2021. At the time, CIMB Foundation was working with ThinkCity on a community project for PPR residents, part of which involved providing online learning resources to students in the community, aimed at facilitating learning loss. At the end of 2021, the Program Komuniti Perkasa PPR workshops were launched, targeted towards building the capacity of community leaders via workshops with students and parents. Student workshops strive to increase motivation in students themselves while promoting interactive learning beyond the classroom. For parents, workshops are meant to encourage active parental involvement in the development and learning of their child.

When CIMB Foundation turned to TFM to create resources, it was then made known that resources were readily available under the Learn From Home initiative. The joint collaboration has allowed for an expanded suite of lessons – Geography and Chemistry lessons were released in January, with a total of 1000 more lessons to be released throughout 2022.

With lessons in place, mapped to the national curriculum for every subject, students are able to utilise these resources to revise and learn units that may have been missed over the last two years. An important example of this, already in place since 2021, is the Tuition For A Cause project by YB Maria Chin Abdullah, the MP of Petaling Jaya, where tutoring is conducted for students based in the Section 17 community. Alternatively, parents, guardians or teachers are able to take charge by assigning lessons to students for revisional purposes. Just as vitally, the FrogPay mobile app – available on all app stores – makes interactive learning especially enjoyable for young learners, who will be able to engage in self-learning sessions.

The idea of a collective model in fostering a common vision of enhancing educational access is not new. Since 2016, YTL Foundation has been part of the Malaysian Collective Impact Initiative, which has brought together 10 organisations to work across 12 schools in Klang. The partnership between CIMB Foundation, YTL Foundation and TFM is yet another example of how collaboration can help scale effective and proven solutions.

On 23rd January 2022, a value-based educational programme was conducted via Zoom by 7 volunteers from the Ariston Club of Heriot-Watt University. With an emphasis on the importance of listening and staying focused on given tasks, 20 students from Leaps Academy, between the ages of 9 and 14, participated in the programme. They were assigned into four breakout rooms and a series of games were incorporated into the session to heighten their engagement with the material. Students were required to practise active listening at all times, learning how to accurately listen as a means of completing tasks given.

Harriet Rogan, a student from Bath University volunteering with the Building Bridges Beyond Border programme, conducted a series of soft skills programmes for refugee youth between the ages of 13 and 18 biweekly, beginning January 2022. In the first session, she introduced soft skills such as interpersonal skills, communication, critical thinking, problem-solving, conflict resolution, creativity, adaptability and teamwork. In the following session, she incorporated games related to self-awareness. These activities facilitated students in understanding more about themselves through sharing their interests and dislikes. In the next session, students learnt about trust through videos and scenarios.

At Leaps Academy, a coding class was also held via Zoom by Akhil, an IT student, for 9 students. The course was held over five days in January 2022. With each session lasting an hour and a half, students were introduced to Python, basic knowledge of coding andasic fundamentals and commands. The coding application Grasshopper was used for coding practices, and Scratch was utilised to create interactive animation. At the end of the series, students expressed an interest in further exploring coding.

Shannon Wong is a recent graduate from Monash University Malaysia and a former YTL scholar. At present, she is based at FrogAsia as a Project Executive. During her years as an undergraduate and postgraduate, while majoring in economics with a minor in marketing, Shannon was actively involved in the volunteer and newspaper societies, in addition to notable student conferences at the National University of Singapore and Trondheim, Norway. Today, she is a key figure in fostering the company culture of those at FrogAsia, affectionately named Froggies.

Having received a YTL scholarship in the second year of her studies, Dayang Dania is currently in the third year of a civil engineering degree at Universiti Teknologi Petronas and is thriving in various ways. Prior to the lockdown, she was active in on-campus event management and participation, switching lanes during the lockdown. At the start of the MCO period, she was tasked with managing a project where RM20,000 was raised for a care home. Recently, apart from a daily commitment to running, she began taking up horse-riding lessons in Johor, where she is based for her internship with YTL Construction, to challenge her individual growth.

On 16 March 2022, PEMIMPIN GSL organised an international Inspire Session. 120 school leaders gathered together to glean insight on how school was carried out during the pandemic, from three school leaders based in Indonesia, Kenya, and India. Topics include project-based learning in school, focusing on the foundations of literacy and numeracy and a project learning community. A school leader from Negeri Sembilan expressed her deepest gratitude after joining the programme, stating she ’would recommend this to my fellow school principals.’ The second international sharing session through the Program Kepimpinan Dalam Talian (PPLPS) programme, PEMIMPIN GSL will be looking into similarly international sharing sessions for future programmes.