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Infosheet on Singapore Highlighted in Latest McKinsey Report “How The World’s Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better”
Key factors contributing to the sustained progress of Singapore’s education system have been analysed and documented in McKinsey & Company’s latest report on education systems. The report, “How the World’s Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better”, studied twenty systems from around the world1, all with improving but differing levels of performance, and examined how each has achieved significant, sustained, and widespread gains in student outcomes, as measured by international and national assessments. Learning points from Singapore’s “great to excellent journey” were highlighted in the report.
The report is a follow-up to the 2007 report, “How the World’s Best Performing School Systems Come Out on Top”, which examined the common attributes of high-performing school systems.
Singapore was studied as one of the “sustained improvers”, defined as a system that has seen five years or more of consistent rises in student performance spanning multiple data points and subjects. The report traces key factors that contributed to Singapore’s sustained progress and highlights learning points from its “great to excellent” journey.
Appropriate Interventions to Improve Performance
The report notes that one of the major challenges for every school system is to decide on the interventions it should make in order to improve its performance. It is also important that school systems should vary the degree of prescription and flexibility it exercises. Singapore is noted as an example of how a system shifts in emphasis as it goes through the various stages of the entire improvement journey, from poor to great, over the past 40 years. Through our three phases of education — namely, “Survival-driven” (1959-78), “Efficiency-driven” (1979-96), and “Ability-driven” (1997-present) phases — Singapore has decreased central guidance on teaching and learning as our system performance has risen. For example, we introduced greater school autonomy in the 1980s and with the “Thinking Schools Learning Nations” initiative, gave teachers greater freedom in classroom practice, and principals decision rights on school management matters.
Singapore is currently on its “great to excellent” journey which emphasizes learning through peers and innovation. This involves raising the calibre of teachers and principals, creating additional support mechanisms for our professionals, and system-sponsored innovation across schools.
Developing Teacher as Professionals
For a system’s improvement journey to be sustained over the long term, the improvements have to be integrated into the very fabric of the system pedagogy. The McKinsey report identified three ways that improving systems do this — by establishing collaborative practices, by developing a mediating layer between the schools and the centre, and by architecting tomorrow’s leadership.
The report highlights how Singapore has worked intensively to strengthen the calibre of our teachers and principals. For instance, we established a system that accommodated three career tracks (Leadership, Teaching, and Senior Specialist), narrowed recruitment into teaching to the top one-third of each graduating cohort, expanded professional development to one hundred hours per year, and created mentorship pairings for school leaders.
To harness collective capacity and encourage innovations on the ground, peer-to-peer professional collaboration is critical. Singapore established its school clusters in 1997 as forums for principals to share experiences and best practices. More recently we have focused on strengthening the networks of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) in schools that encourage teachers to collaborate with one other in reviewing and improving their classroom practice. Teachers also increasingly take responsibility for improving each other’s instructional practice in their schools, particularly as they become more senior.
Nurturing Future School Leadership
The report notes that another key factor for the continued improvement of Singapore’s education system is leadership continuity, where future leaders are developed from within our system. For 30 years, Singapore has had a story of sustained improvement, changing tack towards new horizons as times change, but “never stopping, never doubling back to unwind the past, always moving forward”. McKinsey & Company notes that the Singapore education system possesses the most structured approach to identifying and developing future system and school leaders that they encountered among all 20 systems.
Singapore systematically identifies and develops talented educators for leadership positions from within the school system. All educational leadership positions up to the level of Director-General of Education are considered professional positions and are part of the teaching career structure. All promising teachers are put onto this career track, thereby developing a pipeline of school leaders. Teachers with the potential to become principals are identified at an early stage and appointed to middle-leadership positions in schools. To better prepare them for their management responsibilities, they attend a full-time four-month milestone programme (Management and Leadership in Schools) at the National Institute for Education. Vice-principals attend a six-month Leaders in Education programme, which has an executive orientation similar in scope and intensity to executive courses in business schools, but with a focus on education. Principals receive “CEO-style” development programmes. Experienced principals are given sabbatical opportunities, and top principals can become Cluster Superintendents, as a first step to system leadership.
Stable Leadership at the Top
The report also notes that school systems that have successfully ignited reforms and sustained their momentum have all relied on at least one of three events to get them started — they have either taken advantage of a political or economic crisis, or commissioned a high-profile report critical of the system’s performance, or have appointed a new, energetic and visionary political or strategic leader. Singapore has experienced all three events.
In Singapore, our abrupt departure from Malaysia in 1965, in the midst of economic and social turmoil, prompted then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew to spark decades of deep-rooted school system reform as skilled human capital was Singapore’s only path to prosperity. The appointment of Dr Goh Keng Swee as Education Minister in 1978 and the subsequent commissioning of the Goh Keng Swee Report brought a slew of educational reforms that had lasting impact and contributed to the progress of the Singapore education system.
Footnote
- The school systems studied were Armenia, Aspire (a US charter school system), Boston (Massachusetts), Chile, England, Ghana, Hong Kong, Jordan, Latvia, Lithuania, Long Beach (California), Madhya Pradesh (India), Minas Gerais (Brazil), Ontario (Canada), Poland, Saxony (Germany), Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, and Western Cape (South Africa).↵
This information sheet presents a summary of the McKinsey Report 2010 pertaining to mentions of the Singapore education system only.
For the full McKinsey report, please view it at: http://ssomckinsey.darbyfilms.com/reports/EducationBookNov23.pdf