Speech by Minister for Education and Second Minister for Defence RAdm Teo Chee Hean at the FY2001 Committee of Supply Debate (Second Reply) (15 Mar 2001)

Ministry of Education
FY2001 Committee of Supply Debate
15 March 2001 12.30pm
Minister's Second Reply on Schools

1. Let me deal now with teachers - an issue that my ministry will be focussing on in the school sector this coming year. Teachers lie at the heart of all that we do in education. We need good teachers, and enough of them, to do all that we want to do in education.

2. I will first discuss the issue of pupil teacher ratios and class sizes. The two are not the same thing.

3. Shrinking class sizes has an intuitive appeal. Fewer students mean more attention for each child. Proponents say that it will raise the quality of education, improve pupils' performance, and reduce teacher workloads. Sir, the Ministry of Education is open to all ideas that can improve the quality of education that our students receive and improve the working conditions for teachers. However, we are also mindful that the quality of education is not determined by just a single factor. It is multi-factorial. The factors which influence the quality of education are not limited to class size, but also include curriculum, how it is delivered, school organisation and tone, pupil motivation, home support, and most importantly teacher quality. These factors also interact with each other.

4. Good teachers are key to everything that we do because Education is a completely human enterprise. It is about people, for people and happens through people. While we lay out the systems and infrastructure necessary for an ability based education, we need good people to actually deliver quality education to our children and make an ability driven education happen.

5. Ideally, we would have small classes every one of which would be taught by good teachers. Unfortunately, the proportion of good teachers in the education service and class size are inversely related - when we look at the issue from the scale of the entire education system of a country.

6. Every country faces this problem. In the US and UK, where class sizes are small, the big outcry is over teacher quality. In Sep 1998, the then US Education Secretary Richard Riley pointed out that the US faced a "shortage of high quality teachers", with "shortages developing in specific fields of expertise -- math, science, special education and bilingual education". He lamented that "too many school districts are sacrificing quality for quantity to meet the immediate demand of putting a warm body in front of a classroom. This is a mistake. Even now, too many school districts are issuing emergency licenses"¹. Emergency licences are issued to teachers who are not fully qualified to teach.

7. School systems that have sought to radically reduce class size have found that it has come at the expense of teacher quality because it forces schools to hire under-qualified teachers. I quote from a Jan 2001 Education Week article: "California learned that lesson firsthand when the state undertook its own class-size reduction initiative beginning in 1996. In the first year of implementation, more than a fifth of the new teachers hired in that state had only emergency credentials. Hit hardest were schools serving poor and minority students. And, in the hunt for new space, administrators found themselves carving classrooms out of broom closets and erecting portable classrooms on top of playgrounds²."

8. Because there is a real trade-off between quality and quantity, the empirical evidence on the benefits of focussing on cutting class sizes are inconclusive. The Chronicle of Higher Education (Apr 1998) cited a wide ranging survey of the research that had been done on class sizes. This is the conclusion, and I quote: "277 studies have been done on the effects of class size: Only 15% have found statistically significant benefits in smaller classes, while 13% found that, on average, students in smaller classes performed worse on tests³."

9. Doubling the number of teachers to halve our class sizes is not the same as doubling the number of computers to halve the pupil-computer ratio, or even doubling the amount of space provided in our schools - both of which, incidentally, we are doing. With computers, you just put in an order, they will arrive next week, and most importantly, each computer that comes in is of the same quality, or perhaps even more powerful than the older models that are currently in service. They might even be cheaper than the current models, and we will also get a good discount the larger is our order.

10. Can we do that with teachers? Where do we order them from? Would we enjoy a bulk discount if we hire more teachers? And will they be as good as or better than the ones currently in service? If we lower our standards and increase our intakes, they certainly will not be of the same quality - either in terms of ability to teach, or motivation, or aptitude. The truth is, it is not easy to find good teachers to do all the things that we want to do. This is a challenge that is not unique to Singapore.

11. The choice is not between 40 students taught by a good teacher and two classes of 20, each taught by a good teacher, but 20 taught by a good teacher, and 20 taught by a teacher who is perhaps not fit to teach by today's standards for a teacher.

12. Let me explain the approach that we are taking to build up our teaching force. We recruit as many teachers that we can who meet our standards. We have not limited the numbers that we can recruit. Indeed, the 4000 vacancies that Mr Thomas has pointed out pertains mainly to the provision for the recruitment of trainee teachers as they undergo training at the National Institute of Education (NIE), and "float" posts to hold those on No-pay Leave, Study Leave, Professional Development Leave, scholarships, training awards and secondment. The "float" posts have been provided so that we can recruit more teachers should there be applicants who meet our standards. So while we have been expanding our teaching force, we do so with an eye to quality. This means that it will not translate into dramatically smaller class sizes across the board.

13. We have been able to expand the size of our teaching force, especially in the last 4 years. But because student enrolments in our schools have also been rising, the growth of our teaching service has largely gone into catering to this increased enrolment. Nevertheless, there has in fact been some improvement of pupil teacher ratios. At the primary level, enrolment has increased by 19%, or by some 50,000 students since 1990. But in spite of needing an additional 2,000 teachers to cater to this increased enrolment, we have been able to do a little better than that, and our pupil-teacher ratio has improved slightly from 25.8 to 24.9. At the secondary level, enrolment rose by 10% over the same period but pupil-teacher ratio improved from 21.7 to 18.6 (see Annex). This means that in every school there are now more teachers per student to share the teaching duties compared to 5 years ago. We expect that student enrolments in our secondary schools will increase by nearly 20% again in the coming 4 years. But because our target is to recruit our teachers from the top-third of each cohort, there is a limit to how far we can reduce PTR without compromising on quality. There is also a reality check needed to ascertain what proportion of this pool of potential candidates have the aptitude and interest, and how many we can realistically attract to teach. Not all the teachers we recruit are university graduates, but even so, we are currently already recruiting one out of every eight university graduates, which is a very high level.

14. Given these constraints, MOE's position on deploying our teacher resources, is to do so where the additional teachers can contribute most toward the learning of students. One good example is the Learning Support Programme (LSP) under which P1 and 2 pupils with difficulties in basic literacy skills are taught in small group sizes of 8-10. The LSP supports 20% of P1 pupils and 10% of P2 pupils. The results have been impressive. Over a 10 month period, the P1 LSP pupils increased their reading age by 26 months, thus narrowing their reading age deficit by 16 months. The classes are conducted by 214 Learning Support Coordinators (LSC). Each of our primary schools has at least one LSC. And this year 10 primary schools will get one additional teacher each to implement LSP for Math on a pilot basis. If we had spread these teachers out thinly to help reduce class sizes across the board, their impact would have been negligible.

15. It is more effective to identify the learning needs of the students, and to design programmes that have high impact for a significant number of students, and use the teacher resources that way, which may include smaller classes for specific subjects for specific periods, than to try to reduce class sizes across the board. In this way we have been able to cater to the learning needs of students who deserve more attention, either because they are weaker, as in the learning support programme, or because they have special abilities, as in the gifted education programme.

16. Schools are also given the flexibility to vary their class sizes within the limits of their manpower resources. Some schools, such as Deyi Secondary, have tried to have lecture style classes (of say 80) and smaller classes of say 20 for weaker students. Class sizes in the Normal and Express streams generally range from 30-40. In fact, parents want to place their children in the most popular schools even though their classes are filled to the maximum. We often hear parents suggest that it cannot make much difference if the school squeezes in just one more desk in the class for their child. If class size is indeed the sole or the major determinant of quality, parents would choose schools that are less heavily subscribed, as they are more likely to have vacancies and therefore smaller classes. But they do not. So while I started out by saying that smaller class sizes have an intuitive appeal, all parents do also intuitively understand that there is more to quality than class size, and that it is indeed multi-factorial.

17. Several members have asked about employing foreign teachers. We are recruiting good quality teachers from overseas; we now have 400 of them with us. They are of great help in specific areas, but there is a limit to how many we can have in our system. There are two constraints. First, good teachers are in acute shortage around the world. Recently in the UK, half a million British school children faced having a four-day school week because the education system is short of some 23,000 teachers. And last year, they came to try to recruit our teachers. Second, foreign teachers may not be as sensitised to our norms and values, such as multi-racialism. This is why most of our foreign teachers teach at the secondary level since the primary level is a critical period of socialisation and values inculcation. Even as we cast our net wider, we must be mindful of the appropriate balance between local and foreign teachers in each school.

18. To help foreign teachers adapt to our system, they participate in an Induction Programme conducted by MOE before they are deployed to teach, and receive further support and guidance in their schools and clusters. So far, our foreign teachers, including CL teachers have generally performed well and have adapted to our system. The few teachers who do not demonstrate good performance or good work attitude (about 3%) will not have their contracts renewed.

19. Our bottom line is that we want more good teachers, and we want a good balance between quality and quantity.

20. The correct focus is therefore on building up our teaching force while maintaining teacher quality. Our main efforts will therefore be directed towards recruiting our fair share of talent, and retaining outstanding and experienced teachers. The measures include giving teachers better support and recognition.

21. More administrative support will be provided to teachers. Last year I announced that starting this April, $20 million more will be set aside every year for an extra administrative post for every school; this increases to three the number of administrative posts (SO and MSO) in schools; there were none just five years ago. Schools have the flexibility and autonomy to buy support services to assist teachers in their administrative duties, by using this money and also tapping on their Manpower Grants and school operating fund. Some schools have already done so. Schools can also use the school operating fund to engage people with specialised skills, such as music instructors, to help with CCAs. MOE monitors the usage of these funds and will increase the quantum if needed.

22. We are also providing Principals, HODs and teachers with the necessary IT support to do their work better. IT systems and applications will continue to be introduced to allow schools to facilitate school administration and operations. One example is the integrated IT support system for schools called the School Cockpit, which is being developed at the cost of $35 million. It will enable teachers and school leaders to have all the necessary information, data and statistics at their fingertips to manage their pupils and work better.

23. We also give beginning teachers special support. Being a teacher is intellectually stimulating but it also requires hard work. Beginning teachers especially cannot be expected to get off to a running start when they are first posted to schools. Teachers are provided induction and basic training during their first year in school. School mentors also hand-hold the teachers in their teaching and administrative duties, as well as provide emotional support. Beginning teachers are only given 80% of the standard workload to cater to their special needs for adjustment and training.

24. The main initiative that we will be implementing for teachers this year is reshaping the teaching career so that it can better meet MOE's organisational needs and the aspirations and talents of our teaching force. We want to create a culture of professional excellence which will attract and retain the best teachers, and a profession which nurtures the individual and motivates all to achieve superior performance.

25. We began our current Pay and Career review in September last year. The initial broad recommendations include setting up the teaching and specialist career tracks in addition to the managerial track so that MOE can build up a top-notch team of professional teachers, capable leaders and dedicated specialists. Part of the current review also examines how to restructure the pay system. But it will look beyond tangible rewards. Recognition for teachers will be reshaped within a total framework that includes elements such as learning and development opportunities. For instance, the Ministry will spend more than $1 million a year to fully sponsor teachers for NIE's advanced diploma and advanced postgraduate diploma programmes.

26. The review is expected to be completed soon, and I expect to be able to announce the details within the next two months. With these changes, we would have put in place a strong framework for our education service to continue to attract, reward and develop those with the passion and aptitude required to be teachers. This will help us to have the good teachers, and enough of them, to do all the good things that we want to do in education for our students.

¹ Extracted from speech given by Richard Riley to the "Annual Back to School Address National Press Club" in Sep 1998.
²Extracted from Education Week article on the Internet, Jan 2001.
³Extracted from The Chronicle of Higher Education, Apr 1998.

	Enrolment		Pupil-Teacher Ratio
	Pri	Sec	Pri	Sec
1990	257,757	160,542	25.8	21.7
1995	261,553	180,982	25.0	22.7
2000	305,992	176,132	24.9	18.6