27 November 2002

CLOSING SPEECH BY RADM TEO CHEE HEAN, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION AND SECOND MINISTER FOR DEFENCE AT THE PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE ON JUNIOR COLLEGE/UPPER SECONDARY EDUCATION ON 27 NOV 2002

Mr Speaker, Sir, first of all, let me thank the 34 Members and my 3 colleagues for their views and contributions during this debate.

The Senior Minister of State, Mr Tharman, has dealt with most of the questions and comments raised by Members over the last three days. I am very gratified to see the strong level of support which this motion has received from Members of this House. When you vote later and express your support for this motion, it will send a strong signal to parents, teachers and students, that this House supports this reform and we will be able to carry it through steadfastly and well into the future.

I have listened carefully to all the points made by Members of this House. Let me take a step back and address the key issues raised by the Members of Parliament in the last few days, not just about this review, but also about education in Singapore as a whole and how we make improvements to various parts of it.

The main issues raised can be collected into five major areas. First, why the JC level? What have we done for the rest of our kids? The second question is elitism, and more streaming. The third question is about the curriculum itself. Will greater breadth lead to more stress and a heavier workload? The fourth question is the readiness of teachers. And the fifth question is how we measure the success of our education system.

I will not touch on all these issues because several of them have been addressed adequately by Mr Tharman. Instead, let me take Members through my thought process in the last 5 to 6 years as we implemented changes in the Ministry of Education.

I decided not to stay in Singapore and visit just our schools because then you get locked into a system and begin to think that this is the only way of doing things. I visited school systems around the world. In the East - Korea, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong and all the ASEAN countries. In the West - in Europe, Britain, France, Sweden, Finland, Germany and Switzerland; the US and Israel. One of the most important things that I learned from all these visits is that we have an enormously strong education system.

If we have such a strong system, why change it? We want to be in time to meet the future. The strong system we have was based on the reforms that were put in place in 1979, courageously supported by this House. This brought about streaming, catering to the different abilities of our students. Streaming has led to high levels of achievement not found anywhere else in the world.

The Third International Mathematics and Science Study shows where Secondary 2 students in Singapore from the 5th to the 95th percentile stand in Mathematics. We come out on top of the world. It is an enormous achievement.

Our students at the Normal (Academic) level perform near Belgium's average, ranked 6th out of 38 countries. Our Normal (Technical) students perform near Italy's average, just below the international average. There is no reason at all for our students to feel disadvantaged. They have benefited from an education system that has put them on top of the world, able to compete with others.

Changing our education system is like changing the tyres on a moving car. It is a hazardous business. It is a bumpy ride for the passengers, very dangerous for the driver, even more dangerous for the one trying to change the tyres. Why have we started these changes from the JC level? There are three reasons. First, the JC level is where change is most needed. We have a strong primary education system. I concede that improvements can be made. This we have been doing. We have the Learning Support Programme for children who are weak in English Language when they come to school. We have the ENABLE programme to help students to achieve their potential. By and large, we have achieved high standards in our primary schools, which provide a firm foundation for the secondary schools.

At the secondary school level, we also have high achievement levels. The Secondary 2 performance in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study attest to this. Completion rates are high, articulation into higher education is also high. We are at levels which Britain hopes to reach - 85% having post-secondary education beyond Secondary 4. That is quite a remarkable achievement. And that achievement is possible because of the strengths in our education system, laid down with the foundations of the Goh Keng Swee Report. Without those foundations, we would not have been able to move forward and make the changes that we are proposing to do today.

Among the schools that I have visited around the world, one of the most attractive schools that I went to early in my term as Minister for Education, was the Thomas Jefferson High School in the Washington DC area. It is a Mathematics and Science school where students at the equivalent of our Secondary 3 to JC 2 carry out very interesting projects.

I wondered why we are not able to do this. It struck me that one of the reasons is that, during the same four years, our students of the same calibre are spending a lot of time studying for their 'O' level and 'A' level examinations. Some of these students will require that structure in order for them to proceed. But some of the students can do without that structure, and that structure is really holding them back and stopping them from blossoming.

Referring again to the 5th to the 95th percentile, what is interesting is not the students who were there. It is quite clear that our education system has provided well for this mass of the students. (And my responsibility, as the Minister for Education, is to make sure that we provide for all our students as best as I can from the resources voted to me by this House.) But it is the students who are not there who are interesting. We are one of the smallest countries on that list - 3.2 million indigenous Singaporeans, compared to 270 million Americans. We have about 5% at the bottom end, 5% at the top end who are not on that list. We have many programmes for the small numbers of students at the lower end, for example the Learning Support Programme. And we have achieved high standards. Our Normal (Technical) students are as good as the international average.

But what about the students in the top 5%? The good models of education that my colleagues in this House have spoken about are actually models of education, whether it is MIT, Brooklyn High, Bronx High, which are really for students who are not on the chart. They are in the top 1/2%, 1% maybe, of the population. Our top 5% is about 2,000 students a year. The United States has 90 times our population. Their top 5 % is therefore 4.5 times the size of one whole cohort of our students. They provide for them in a variety of ways. We need to provide for our top students too in order to get the most out of them.

Is this an elitist system? My colleague, Dr Ng Eng Hen, has shown from his data yesterday that we provide a very good education for all our students. The JC students academically are the top 25%. Our ITE students academically are in the lower quartile. We provide for them very adequately, and we will continue to provide them with as much as they need to have a good education. We must not short-change ourselves by failing to provide for our good students.

What is important is that we adhere to the two principles I referred to in my opening speech. The first is that the principle of meritocracy continues to apply. In the United States, many of these top 5% are in private schools. Our schools take in students regardless of their socio-economic background, provided they can make it. Our primary schools and secondary schools are strong enough to make sure that students from all backgrounds, provided they do well, can benefit from the best that our education system that our country can offer them. That is a fundamental difference between our system and the US system where much of the top end, or the top 5%, is provided for in private schools for people who can afford to pay.

So it is important that our JC/upper secondary system also provides different paths for our students so that they can develop. But one of the dilemmas I had to face - and why it took me so many years, since I visited Thomas Jefferson School in 1997 - is that I was looking for a clean solution which could be systematically applied to all our students. We have a very neat system today. Six years of primary school, four to five years of secondary school, and after that, students disperse to various institutions. I was trying to look for a neat, clean solution, a system, a basis like that.

I was thinking also of the needs of our students who go to polytechnics and ITE. To cause them to go through 12 years in school would be the wrong thing to do. I have looked at the US system too, not the top end, but the middle band. 12 years of general education in school is not the right thing to do. By the time students are 17 years old, many are getting very restless and are not going to stay in school to learn more Mathematics, Geography, History, or English Literature. They want to do something which has direct relevance to their work in the future. That is one of the reasons why at the upper secondary level, Grades 11 and 12, the drop-out rates are high. The alternative of trying to bring a vocational and technical education into the high school does not work. I have not seen it work satisfactorily anywhere, because a school is not able to create the right environment for this. Our ITE and polytechnics provide a much better education for such students.

Another consequence of having a vocational high school is that we will end up with stratified high schools, streamed high schools, where the students will not be able to mix with other students. Then we will have a different kind of problem. So I had a tussle between these two requirements. 10 years of education is about right for the majority of our students who will go to Polytechnic and ITE. But we need 12 and, possibly, a through-train for those students who go to university. But how to devise a system that is neat, and which can be drawn on a two-dimensional chart, rather than a three-dimensional chart. Unfortunately, I could not find the answer.

That is why some time last year, after thinking it through, I felt that the way forward was to allow for a system which is much more diverse with many more choices. It will be a system which is not as neat and as clean as the system that we have today. But this is what we should do if we want to introduce more opportunities and more variety for our students.

The secondary and primary school system can benefit from many of the same concepts and ideas proposed for the JC sector but, we should not have parity in terms of solutions. The same solution may not be suitable for all the students. However, there are certain principles and ideas that can be applied across the board. For example, communication skills, lifelong learning, and the right values and attitudes, are developed in our students throughout the education system.

We should find solutions which are appropriate to each group of students and give them the appropriate resources. The first students to get computers in the schools were our Normal (Technical) students in 1994, not the top-end students, because we felt that these students needed something hands-on to excite them, to keep them in class, to help them to learn. So, we gave it to them. I am glad many hon. Members accepted my invitation to visit the ITEs. They saw for themselves how exciting the learning environment is in the ITEs, and how engaged the students were. This is something which we will not find in an education system in any other part of the world for this group of students.

For this reform, the critical area to focus on was the upper secondary and JC system. What are the other reasons why we have reformed the upper secondary and JC system? The second reason is because it is faster to do it this way. If we start from Grade 1 and move up, it would take us many, many years. It would take us three or four years to develop a whole curriculum, 12 years for it to flow right through.

The third reason is that change may be even more difficult to achieve, if we start from Primary 1. In an education system, what motivates teachers, students and parents is the end point. If they cannot see what is at the end, they are not going to change their behaviour at the beginning. If we do not change the end, it is very hard to change the beginning. If we start at Primary 1 and say this is what it is going to look like roughly at the end but, in the meantime, for the next 11 or 12 years, the students in the higher grades are doing what they did before because we have not changed it yet, it is very hard to get people to envision the future and be prepared to change. When we made a small change in the university admission system to include project work, as all parents with primary school-going children know, their children are now doing projects and related activities. The signalling is almost instant through the system. And when we want to make a change later in the rest of the system, it is much easier to do. In the meantime, the correct signals are being passed down the chain.

What kind of education system are we trying to design? This is something which some hon. Members have asked. When I look at the eastern education systems, ie, in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea, we are high on conformity, structure and achievement. Much of Europe has been affected by socialism and by political correctness, as a result of which standards have not been maintained because the system tries to pretend that everyone is the same and gives everyone the same diet, which leads to not very high standards. That is why people escape from the public system and go into private education.

The United States, in a sense, is at the opposite end of the East Asian education systems. It has some of the most excellent schools I have seen anywhere in the world, but it also has some of the most dreadful schools. It is a system of enormous contrasts, and I am always surprised that, in a country that prides itself on equal opportunity, they have not had a revolution yet.

So, what is it that we are trying to build. Earlier this year I met the Secretary for Education, Roderick Paige. Education reporters there asked me, "You are so high up on the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, what is it that you hope to learn from the United States?" My answer was, "We are a system of high averages in Singapore, but in the United States you have a system that has been able to produce high peaks." We want to try to marry those two parts together. To maintain the structure and the rigour which has given us those high averages and put us up there on the top of the list. But we must also try and put into our system a path which allows our people, the very few people that we have, to reach those high peaks. By having this merger, this hybrid of what I would characterise as an Eastern and the US education system, avoiding the worst parts but pulling together the best parts, I think we will have a very good education system in the future.

Can we succeed? Yes, we can succeed, because we are somewhere in between both systems today anyway. We are neither at one extreme nor the other, and I believe that in our system, which is small enough, with people forward-looking enough and people, including in this House, courageous enough to say, "Yes, we will go for such a system", we can make it work.

The second point is that of elitism. It is important, as we move towards a more differentiated system with IP schools, that the students in those schools learn that they have a responsibility to society and their fellow citizens. But it is not as simple as Mr Steve Chia would have it, that the schools have to do this and do that. The society has to do it, ie, parents, all of us, by word, by deed, have to show to these young people that this is the right thing to do: "You have a responsibility for your fellow man, you have a responsibility for your fellow citizens, you have a responsibility for your country, particularly if you are better off, brighter, and more able."

I am heartened also to note that all Members who have spoken on the issue have come out in support of private schools. Freeing up the private school sector is a departure from the meritocratic practice in the education system that we have today, since admission will depend in part on the ability to pay. These private schools will be privately funded. Well-run private schools can contribute to our education system by providing an added source of ideas and innovative practices in education. They can also cater to children whose parents might otherwise have sent them overseas for a secondary or JC education for a variety of reasons. This is again an issue which I have tossed about in my mind and wrestled with for a while, because of the very same reasons that some of the hon. Members of this House have raised on this issue of private schools.

On balance, it is reasonable to allow two to three privately-funded schools to be set up. We will put in place certain requirements to ensure that such schools will offer an essentially Singaporean education and encourage them to make sure that their students mix well. They will have to adhere to key national education policies and have a majority Singaporean enrolment. But we will regulate them with a very light touch, otherwise it is no point having privately-funded schools.

I am confident that as long as our national education system continues to be innovative and remains vibrant and responsive, and we do not dumb it down, our national schools, with merit-based admission criteria, will continue to remain the mainstay of our education system. The Government will not be offering scholarships to privately-funded schools, as any able student will always be able to secure a place in our best state schools.

I wish to commend hon. Members once again for weighing the issue of privately-funded schools in a considered manner and supporting their establishment. It reflects the growing maturity of the society and its readiness to extend greater choice to people.

The third issue was one of broadening versus workload and stress. I do not propose to address this issue in detail, because Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam has addressed it sufficiently. Suffice for me to say that I believe that our students will continue to work as hard, and that is not a bad thing. I would prefer our students to work hard, and then to have to persuade them to work less hard, rather than to have to push them along to make them work harder.

By changing the curriculum structure, assessment system and what counts, we can influence the motivation of teachers, students and parents, and how students spend their time and energy, and move them in the direction that we want them to. This is what the review will do.

The fourth issue is the question of teacher readiness. Are our teachers ready? The first point I would like to raise is that our teachers are much maligned. They are really a good lot, very enthusiastic and prepared to do many things. And they do a lot. I hope that hon. Members will continue to be encouraging to our teachers, and speak to them and treat them the way we would want them to treat our children, ie, encourage them rather than criticise them all the time.

Are our teachers prepared to deliver the new curriculum with its greater emphasis on skills and breadth? We have a strong forward-looking teaching force which is not unfamiliar with change. When I first came in to the Ministry of Education, Mr Lawrence Sia, an hon. Member of this House before, told me how many Ministers for Education he had survived and said, "We have seen all these changes, we are used to all these changes, and we have been changing all the time." So he wanted to see what this new Minister for Education would change.

Our education system has been changing and adapting all this while, and so have our teachers. They are a remarkably resilient lot who have been very adaptable to change. One example is when we introduced computers. We only did that five years ago. Initially, schools did not want to be first on the queue to be computerised. But after a year or a year and a half, when I visited schools, they were asking, "When is it our turn? We want to go." And this is about teachers across-the-board. I went to one neighbourhood school where I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the Chinese Language Department was the first in that school to have gone computerised. They saw it coming, they got the computers, they got together, trained themselves and moved forward. So, they were more ready than anybody else in that school with computers. These are the kinds of teacher that we have.

Our teachers enjoy opportunities for professional development throughout their careers. The National Institute of Education has undergone a complete revamp in the last five years. I should invite hon. Members to visit the National Institute of Education to see what has happened. We now run one of the best courses for principals anywhere in the world. It is a 6-month executive-type programme. We take the principals through not just the education side of it but how to manage people, how to run an organisation for change. We attach them to companies in the private sector, we take them to visit schools overseas, and they go back to the schools with a very different approach and attitude.

NIE has restructured its courses. One of the key things that NIE stresses now is values education. One of the reasons NIE stresses on values education is because we have seen an enormous transformation in our teaching force. In the last five years, we have recruited more than 10,000 teachers. Our whole teaching force is only 25,000 strong. Many experienced teachers are due to retire. We are taking many new teachers in and it is important that the values of the teaching force are maintained.

Members will be happy to know that for assessment of schools, we do not just do ranking by academic results. We already have SEM in place. It is, basically, a self-assessment of the school and, from time to time, an external validation board will come in to have a look at how the school is doing. I think academic ranking is still important, because it is a matter of accountability to you. If we do not have ranking, you would ask for it, which is what happened in the United States, in the United Kingdom and other jurisdictions. The parents, taxpayers and Members of Parliament wanted to know how their schools are doing, in relation to other schools in the world.

I have been to school districts in the United States. They pulled me aside and proudly told me, "You know, in TIMSS, we beat Singapore." They are watching their ranking. We should not give up ranking, because it is an important tool of accountability for schools. We can rank them on a number of different areas. That I agree. But to stop ranking them would be to give up a tool of accountability to you, something which our schools and educators owe to you. Of course, in any jurisdiction in the world, I have never been to a school district where the teachers like ranking. Of course, they do not. Why would you want to be held accountable if you can get away without being accountable? I have never met a school district where the teacher said, "Yes, ranking is a wonderful thing." But I am surprised that Members of this House should say that we should stop ranking. Because, if we stop ranking, we would have no instrument of accountability.

We are introducing a new personnel management system to assess our teachers. It is an open system. It will assess performance and potential but it also has a very strong developmental element in it. We have been working on it for the last 2-3 years with Hays Management Consultants. It is defined in terms of what teachers need to do to improve the quality of education for their students. Certainly, it is not based on absolute scores of their students. It has never been. We are beginning to implement this in our schools starting with the management level - the principals, the heads of departments, subject and level heads - so that they understand the instrument very well, and we can fix whatever problems there are, before we apply it to the teaching force as a whole.

Do we have enough teachers and teaching resources? We have managed to improve pupil-teacher ratios across the board - primary, secondary and JCs - over the last few years. This is because we have strong recruitment and strong retention. And with the changes that we have done with EduPac, the salary structures and the retention bonuses, we hope that we will continue to have strong retention when our economy turns up.

For the JCs and CIs, we had a pupil-teacher ratio of 16.4 in 1990. It has come down gradually, and it is now 13.2. We have also given resources to our JCs, with school administrators and operations managers. Each JC has a budget of about $144,000 a year - $12,000 a month - to hire administrative help if they need to. They can do it in whatever form they want. When we implement the proposed changes, we intend to give the JCs the resources that they need to do their job properly.

Finally, let me address this issue of measuring success. I could not help a smile escaping from my lips when the subject came up on assessing success. Measures such as the performance of our students in TIMSS are almost taken for granted and dismissed as irrelevant by this House. Or even more strangely, success in Mathematics and Science is seen as a negative. In a delightful little speech yesterday, Ms Indranee Rajah, in a lovely leap of logic, ascribed poor road habits and not knowing right from wrong, I suppose, to our emphasis on Mathematics and Science and lack of emphasis on humanities. I think this is really going a little too far. In practically every country that I have been to, my colleagues have complimented me on the achievements in TIMSS, and lament that they have serious shortages of people adequately trained and prepared in Mathematics and Science in their schools. And the more developed the country, the more serious the shortage. The United States lives on imported engineers from abroad and they know that this shortage will affect their competitiveness in the future. They also lament that they are under a lot of pressure from their public and electorate to explain why their students did not do well in TIMSS. They are somewhat bemused when I tell them that I have the opposite problem in Singapore.

We have an excellent system today because of the changes and adaptations that we have made over the years - the vision and courage of my predecessors in the Ministry of Education, who introduced those changes, and the Members of this House, particularly in 1979, who supported them. We have not shied away from making major and difficult decisions to help our students do better and address the social and economic challenges of the day. We have made real improvements in education, not whitewashed the problems away or tried to make people feel better and then, 5-10 years later, they find that they are really worse off.

The result has been a resilient, rugged people, equipped with the basics for economic survival and employability. We know that our education system is a good one because, to-date, we have done well by all international measures and ranking that serve as proxy measures of how competitive our people are, how strong we are as a nation, and how well-prepared we are for the future. Singapore has passed various tests that developments in global politics and the world economy have thrown at us. Against all odds, we have prospered and grown as a nation.

I am confident that the proposed changes will build on our current strength and result in a better education system capable of producing the leaders, innovators and citizens Singapore needs in a globalised, innovation-driven future. We will know whether this latest set of educational reforms is successful when future cohorts of Singaporeans are put through the crucible of world competition. The market, not us, will decide what the criteria for success are. We do not know what the future tests are, what the future challenges are and what the future proxy tests that will be used to measure whether or not our education system is successful. But what we are trying to do here in this House is to look into the future and try and make sure that our Singaporeans are there to meet it. Singaporeans must be able to hold their own and forge ahead, not just as individuals, but as a cohesive united people. The education system must be able to equip them with the knowledge, skills and the values to do so.

Members of this House would have had the opportunity to study the recommendations carefully in their totality and make an assessment of whether the proposed changes are what we need to face the challenges ahead of us. The road will not be a smooth one. There will be bumps along the way in implementation. The Whip has been lifted, and I hope Members will vote with courage and conviction and give their full support to the changes proposed. A clear parliamentary vote of support will show that Members acknowledge that the changes point us in the right direction and are committed to seeing through the challenges and issues we will face as we implement them. It will send a clear signal of the broad-based support and commitment necessary for the successful implementation of the recommendations.