The education domain has been one of the major settings in which linguistic landscape studies are embedded due to its close relationship with language policy. Malaysia, as a multilingual and multi-ethnic society, is little known about its schoolscapes in different streams of schools in current literature. Adopting the Three-dimensional Framework (Trumper-Hecht, 2010) , this paper is endeavoured to investigate the relationship between political and physical dimension of different streams of schools in Sandakan, namely national primary school, national-type primary school, private primary school, national secondary school, national-type secondary school and Chinese independent secondary school.  11,035 photos from 18 schools are collected and semi-structured interviews with school principals are conducted to examine the decisive factors in designing linguistic schoolscapes. In terms of physical dimension, Malay, English, and Mandarin are the most common languages across primary and secondary schools. Specifically, national schools and national-type secondary schools are predominantly Malay, national-type primary schools and Chinese independent secondary schools are predominantly Mandarin, while private primary schools are predominantly Malay and English. In terms of  political dimension, the construction of schoolscapes can be influenced by national policies (macro), local policies (meso), and school ideologies (micro). Results indicate that there is a bi-directional relationship between the physical and political dimensions. While national policies influence the physical dimension, the physical dimension becomes a platform for reflecting national policies and negotiating the coexistence of school ideologies. The greater the implementation strength of policies, the more they can influence and be reflected in the schoolscapes. Additionally, the physical dimension also serves as a negotiating platform for language ideologies related to ethnic minorities, religions, and historical evolutions. The discussion of relationships between political and physical dimensions in schoolscapes enhances our understanding of the status of various languages in educational spaces in Malaysia.

Keywords: Schoolscape; Malaysia; Political dimension; Physical dimension