Singapore: Five days in thinking schools and a learning nation

Educating for the future
By Andreas Schleicher, Published TODAY, 8 Nov 2011

THIS year, as a visiting professor at the National Institute of Education (NIE), I learnt about how Singapore transformed itself from a developing country into a modern industrial economy in one generation.

This is a story about political coherence and leadership, and about policy and practice. It's about setting ambitious standards in everything you do, and about focusing on building teaching and leadership capacity to deliver vision and strategy at the school level.

And it's about a culture of continuous improvement and future orientation that benchmarks educational practices against the best in the world.

At an institutional level, both policy coherence and fidelity of implementation are brought about by a strategic relationship between the Ministry of Education, the NIE and the schools. That's not just words. The reports from policymakers, researchers and teachers were entirely consistent, even where they represented different perspectives.

I saw how all this plays out in practice in Qifa Primary School. It was the experience you would expect in Singapore: a charismatic school leader, an engaged team of teachers with a critical and collaborative mindset, and disciplined and yet cheerful pupils.

But what impressed me most was a visit to one of the campuses of the Institute of Technical Education (ITE). At the school's restaurant, entirely managed and run by students serving dishes from a dozen cultures, I saw that here is a country that doesn't see culture as an obstacle but seeks to capitalise on its diversity.

The facilities and amenities of the ITE are comparable to those of modern universities elsewhere. In a classroom with up-to-date technology, a visiting Australian chef captivated a group of students on the latest research on preparing meat.

The same amount of public money is invested into every vocational student as the high school student going to its most prestigious university, and the quality of teaching is prioritised over the size of classes. Clearly, Singapore seeks to break the East Asian mould where academic achievement is revered as the only route to success, recognising that students learn differently at different stages in their lives. The ITE is now sought-after by students, with 90 per cent of graduates finding jobs in their chosen fields, up from 60 per cent decades ago.

There are important lessons the world can learn from here. To those who believe that systemic change in education is not possible, Singapore has shown several times over how this can be achieved.

To become and remain high-performing countries, a policy infrastructure is needed for driving the performance and building the capacity for educators to deliver in schools. Singapore has developed both, and is today the result of several decades of judicious policy and effective implementation. On the spectrum of national reform models, Singapore's is both comprehensive - the goal has been to move the whole system - and public policy driven.

These features struck me most:

Meritocracy

I heard not just from policymakers or educators but also from students of all ethnic backgrounds and ability that education is the route to advancement, and that hard work and effort eventually pays off.

The Government has put in place a wide range of educational and social policies to advance this goal, with early intervention and multiple pathways to education and career. The success of the Government's economic and educational policies has brought about immense social mobility that has created a shared sense of national mission and made cultural support for education a near-universal value.

Vision, leadership and competency

Leaders with a bold long-term vision of the role of education in a society and economy are essential for creating educational excellence. I was consistently impressed with the people I met at both the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Manpower. They function in a culture of continuous improvement, constantly assessing what is and isn't working, using both data and practitioner experience from around the world. I was speaking with Education Minister Heng Swee Keat about our Skills Strategy, only to realise that he had already studied most of my slides. The close collaboration between policy, research and practice provides a guide that keeps the vision moving forward and dynamic, where education changes as conditions change rather than being mired in the past.

There is coherence. In Singapore, whenever a policy is developed or changed, there seems to be an enormous attention paid to the details of implementation, from the Ministry of Education, to the NIE, principals and teachers. The result is a remarkable fidelity of implementation which you see in the consistency of the reports from different stakeholders.

There are clear goals, rigorous standards and high-stakes gateways. The academic standards set by Singapore are as high as anywhere in the world, and that is also what you see from its results in Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment). Students, teachers and principals all work very hard towards important gateways. Rigour, coherence and focus are the watchwords. Serious attention to curriculum development has produced strong programmes in maths, science, technical education and languages and ensured that teachers are well trained to teach them.

There are high-quality teachers and principals. The system actively recruits talent, accompanied by coherent training and serious and continuing support that promotes teacher growth, recognition, opportunity and well-being. And Singapore looks ahead, realising that as the economy continues to grow and change, it will become harder to recruit the kind of top-level people into teaching that are needed to support 21st century learning.

Intelligent accountability

Singapore runs on performance management. Serious attention is paid to setting annual goals, to garnering the needed support to meet them and to assessing whether they have been met. Data on student performance is included, but so too are a range of other measures, such as contribution to school and community, and judgments by a number of senior practitioners. While no country believes it has got accountability exactly right, Singapore's system uses a wide range of indicators and involves a wide range of professionals in making judgments about the performance of adults in the system.

What Singapore can learn from others

SO IS there nothing that Singapore can learn from the world? Actually there are a number of points.

It can mandate good performance but it needs to unleash greatness. Finland provides an example for how you can shift the focus from a regulating policy environment towards an enabling one. Perhaps it was no surprise then that when I met Minister of State Lawrence Wong for lunch, he had just returned from a visit to Finland.

Educators know the skills that are easiest to teach and to test are also the easiest to digitise, automate and outsource. That value is less and less created vertically through command and control and increasingly created horizontally, by whom you connect and work with.

Efforts have been initiated to develop imaginative skills to connect the dots and to anticipate where the next invention will come from; about ways of working, including communication and collaboration; and about the tools for working, including the capacity to recognise and exploit the potential of new technologies. The current central discussion is now on ethics, values and the capacity of students to live in a multifaceted world as active and engaged citizens.

But Singapore, like elsewhere, struggles to find appropriate answers for what students should learn, the ways in which they can learn these broader competences, and how teaching and schooling need to change to achieve this.

Despite building many bridges and ladders across the system, Pisa shows how social background still creates important barriers for student success. Like others, Singapore finds that meritocracy alone provides no guarantee for equity, and that it takes effective systems of support to moderate the impact of social background on student and school outcomes, and to identify and foster the extraordinary talents of ordinary students.

Educators are inspired by the life-changing opportunities created at NorthLight School. There is also considerable interest in Shanghai's success with attracting the most effective school principals to the toughest schools, and the most talented teachers to the most challenging classrooms.

While Singapore does well in maximising public value for money, parents are spending significant resources on private tutoring. When measured in Pisa metrics, private tutoring actually adds very little in value to the high-quality education in Singaporean schools but it does take up a disproportionate amount of student learning time. Singapore would make much better use of the country's economic and human resources by accepting rather than ignoring the demand for more personalised learning and perhaps building it into the regular school days of public schools, as countries like Denmark or Finland have successfully done.

So there remain lessons which Singapore can learn from the world, and much to gain from education systems collaborating to address tomorrow's challenges to their strengths today.

The writer is Head of the Indicators and Analysis Division in the Directorate for Education at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and Special Adviser on education policy. A version of this article first appeared as a blog on the OECD website.