community to sustain these schools. To attract more labourers and make them stay longer, the government passed a labour ordinance in 1912 requiring that the estate managements had to set up Tamil schools if there were more than 10 school-going children in the estate. However many estates owners refused to build new buildings for schools, causing the children to study in dilapidated buildings and former smoke houses. Furthermore, the government in those days had not allocated funds to build Tamil schools. Tamil schools at that time used the school curriculum from India and did not have teaching of the Malay and English languages. Emphasis was given only to reading, writing and arithmetic skills in the lower primary level and writing composition and geography was taught in the higher primary level. The children, on leaving the Tamil primary school, were absorbed into the working milieu of the plantations. Parents themselves, mostly illiterate, did not see the value or purpose of seeking out a secondary education. Furthermore, the colonial government was intending to keep the Indians in the plantations and had no interest in providing education beyond the primary level. As a result, Tamil secondary schools were not established in Malaya. Between 1930 and 1937, there were some developments in Tamil education when the British Indian government was concerned about the mistreatment of Indian labourers in Malaya. As a result, the Malayan government set up a special committee to provide financial assistance to Tamil schools, appointed inspectors for Tamil schools and also started teachers' training. The number of Tamil schools had also increased tremendously. By 1938, there were 13 government, 511 estate and 23 mission Tamil primary schools in Malaya. After World War II, the government started to give serious attention to vernacular education by enforcing Education Ordinance 1946. The law emphasised on free mother tongue education and increased the grant provision to Tamil schools. This move paved the way to the increase of students in Tamil schools. Number of students increased gradually from 29,800 in 1946 to 38,700 in 1949. In 1951, the Indian Education Committee reviewed Tamil education and proposed teaching of English in Year 4 and Malay in Year 5. As Malaya began to move towards self-government and eventual independence, efforts were made to develop a national education policy. The Barnes Report, published in 1951 and enacted as the Education Ordinance of 1952, proposed a national school system with