Where to find Good Education?

Singapore has the answer

How do you achieve a school system consistently in the top three in the world for maths and science, fourth for literacy, and described by experts as leading the world in teaching quality? More over, how do you manage to get 80 per cent of pupils to meet minimum standards at the age of 16 when they are taught in their second language in classes of 35? The answers are found in Singapore.

On a study visit organized by the charity CfBT Education Trust, British Teachers were sent to several countries to see what they can learn from other school systems. So what did they expect to find? One assistant head teacher from central England expected to see “a very traditional curriculum, rows of pupils, teacher in front, students there to learn”. And indeed she did. But she also saw a whole lot more: traditional methods blended with more progressive thinking. It gave the British teachers plenty to ponder. International comparisons are fraught with difficulties; it is easy to forget that what works in one country will not flourish in another.

But Singapore has many similarities to the UK. The official language of school instruction is English, there is a national curriculum, and the national examinations are the British single-subject O-levels taken at the age of 16 and the more advanced single-subject A-levels taken at 18 or 19, all administered by Cambridge Assessment from the UK. It was soon clear to the British teachers that there are similar challenges. Singapore is a multi-ethnic, multilingual society. Pupils are obsessed with mobile phones and computer games, and are, as one Singapore school principal put it, the “strawberry generation: easily bruised and damaged”. So why does it work? First, education is the government’s top priority.

That is not just rhetoric: a country with no natural resources ( it even has to import water) knows it lives and dies by its collective brainpower. The ministry of education is very close to schools; as all teachers and principals are civil servants, they regularly rotate through postings to the ministry. The government provides funds for school visits, clubs and extra-curricular activities, enabling them to make such activities compulsory. In another reform, the ministry announced recently that all primary schools would move to single-session teaching, with the juniors taught in the morning and the infants in the afternoon. This will bring smaller classes, better pupil-teacher ratios, and allow a programme of compulsory extra-curricular activities for the juniors in the afternoon.

In a reform called the Integrated Programme, schools with more able pupils are encouraged to bypass exams at 16, allowing greater curriculum flexibility. One visiting head-teacher from Essex was struck by the real stretch offered to more able pupils, the “clear articulation of ideas between government and schools”, and the way the whole system not only “talked the talk, but also walked the walk”.