Sabah Education in Numbers — Schools, Pupils & Teachers

How many schools does Sabah have?

The Ministry of Education counted 1,073 government and government-aided primary schools and 222 secondary schools in Sabah in 2020, almost unchanged from 1,074 and 222 in 2018 (published by DOSM). Tuaran (75), Ranau (71) and Keningau (70) had the most primary schools; Kota Kinabalu (24), Tawau (22) and Sandakan (21) had the most secondary schools.

Private schools are few: 18 primary and 15 secondary in 2020, including 9 Chinese independent secondary schools, with 10,155 pupils between them. Religious schools under the state Islamic religious department are counted separately (DOSM, Tables 36–41).

Teachers

Government and government-aided schools had 26,612 primary and 16,424 secondary teachers in 2020. That is about 10.9 primary and 12.2 secondary pupils per teacher on average (our calculation), though averages hide small rural schools and crowded urban ones. Women made up 62% of primary and secondary teachers combined.

Literacy

We have not found a current official literacy rate for Sabah from DOSM, so the figure of about 85% that this page used to show has been removed. An assessment by Jo-Yee Yap on the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network's SDG portal for Malaysian states, using data to 2019, found that Sabah and Labuan were the only two that had not met the target for functional literacy (indicator 4.6.1), and that Sabah's scores had been falling since 2016.

Universities

Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) is the state's public university, with its main campus in Kota Kinabalu, an international campus in Labuan and a sustainable agriculture faculty in Sandakan. For the 2025/2026 session it took in 5,123 new students: 4,167 in Kota Kinabalu, 734 in Labuan and 222 in Sandakan. 3,648 came from Sabah and 65% were women (Malaysia Gazette, 28 September 2025).

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