A Joint Event by the Partnerships Engagement Office (PEO) and Education and Career Guidance Branch (ECGB)
1. Good evening, everyone. It is a pleasure to welcome our industry partners, educators and colleagues.
2. I am encouraged to see so many partners here who share our commitment to help our students learn, grow and reach their potential.
- Almost 300 of you are here today, representing 92 industry partners and 40 schools. Thank you for making the time to join us.
Growing Our Students Holistically Through Partnerships
3. In the Education Conversations that MOE has been holding this year, one message we have heard from many different groups is that holistic development must remain at the heart of education.
- In our schools, we help students build strong foundations and master their knowledge.
- But together with knowledge, we also want to nurture their values and character, help them discover their strengths, and develop the skills and dispositions they need to thrive. In MOE, we call these 21st century competencies. For instance, curiosity, teamwork, communication, empathy, and so on.
4. As industry partners, you are key to some of these efforts because when you provide our students with exposure to real-world challenges in partnerships with our schools, you help to make learning even more meaningful, real, and relevant.
- Our students can see how what they are learning in school and in the classroom can be applied outside of the classroom. This deepens their interest and shows them that they are not just learning academic subjects for their own sake.
- They can discover new interests, and a wide range of possible career paths they can pursue and industries they can join in future.
- And they of course develop 21st century competencies too in the course of working on your projects.
5. Let me share a few examples. Aurora, Caitlyn and Shaochen are students from Punggol Green Primary School. They learnt that persons with special education needs face challenges expressing their emotions. So they worked with mentors from STMicroelectronics to design a prototype that could indicate emotional states, track location, and help them with sensory management.
- When they later visited Eden School, a Special Education (SPED) school, they saw their prototype come alive and employed in action. On their own initiative, they asked Special Education educators how they could improve this prototype. These young students were applying what they learnt in STEM, and at the same time, they were growing in empathy and understanding. They learnt to collaborate, to communicate two-way, and developed critical thinking.
- Inspired by these three students' desire to make a difference, STMicroelectronics has since extended the partnership to the school's entire Primary 6 cohort of 270 students.
6. As Industry partners, these partnerships help to enrich learning in our secondary schools too.
- Take the Boeing Aviation Challenge. Secondary 3 students from St. Gabriel's Secondary School are mentored by Boeing professionals as they tackle real-world problems in the aviation and aerospace sector. These include optimising crew pairing for flights, and protecting runways from foreign object debris.
- Along the way, our students picked up technical knowledge, and also developed skills in collaboration, communication and problem-solving.
- Now in its third year, the partnership has grown to include Changkat Changi Secondary School, reaching 120 students across both these schools. Teachers and Boeing representatives also jointly create the challenge, so that it better meets their students' interests as well as their learning requirements.
7. These examples I've articulated show what strong school-industry partnerships can achieve.
Redesigning Classrooms, Reimagining Learning
8. I'll say that these efforts will become even more important for us. Technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) are advancing rapidly and fast reshaping the workplace. To succeed in tomorrow's world, our students will need to deal with less defined challenges and less familiar answers. They must learn to convene and build teams, be curious, adaptable, and resilient.
9. To prepare our students for this future, we must keep evolving the way we teach and learn. At the Schools Work Plan Seminar in September this year, I spoke about the next phase of MOE's transformation: "Redesigning Classrooms, Reimagining Learning".
10. Our goal is to strengthen holistic development and prepare our students for this more uncertain future. To achieve this, we want them to learn more actively, take greater ownership of their learning, and apply what they know in authentic contexts. This will help them remember what they have learnt and be able to master knowledge.
- This means redesigning our learning environments, exploring where smaller classes can best support learner-centred approaches, and making better use of technology.
- These changes will help us to create more opportunities for inquiry, collaboration and real-world problem-solving.
11. As we reimagine learning, connections beyond the classroom will matter even more.
Strengthening Partnerships for the Future
12. So to support this transformation, we want to strengthen these connections, and make a bigger push to grow school-industry partnerships in every school.
13. My colleagues at MOE have long played the role of "matchmaker". Colleagues across many divisions help schools and industry partners build fruitful partnerships.
- To date, our Partnerships Engagement Office has engaged over 180 enterprises, associations and agencies, and facilitated over 60 such school-industry partnerships.
- Complementing this, our Education and Career Guidance (ECG) Branch has brought on board both organisations and individuals to help enrich our students' education and career guidance, and to support the professional development of educators as well as ECG Counsellors.
14. As part of this bigger push, I am pleased to launch ECG Match, a new digital platform that connects teachers in primary, secondary and pre-university institutions with individuals and organisations from diverse sectors.
- With ECG Match, our schools can tap directly on strong networks of partners, so that every child can get meaningful exposure to the World of Work.
- Our partners can contribute in ways that suit them, whatever their time commitment. You can share your career story, host a learning journey, or even join a class for a short virtual session.
- Imagine a land surveyor joining a Mathematics class to bring trigonometry to life. Even a brief interaction can spark curiosity and broaden our students' career horizons.
15. We started with a database of 200 partners in 2025. Today, we have grown to 700 partners, and we aim for the platform to reach 2,000 by the year 2027.
- Schools with strong networks have already rallied their alumni to sign up, and I encourage other schools to do the same, to work with your alumni as well.
16. With more partners on board, teachers will be better placed to find the expertise and support that meet their students' learning needs.
- I invite all of you – companies, professional associations, trade bodies and individuals – to join us in this effort, whether through ECG Match or other partnerships with our schools.
- Share your expertise and your experience. Open up your workplaces. Work with our educators to create meaningful learning experiences for our students. In doing so, you will help us shape the next generation of Singaporean leaders for your industry, and make a difference to the next generation.
Conclusion
17. The future of education extends beyond the school gates. It connects learning with real work, real people and real issues. We cannot do this alone. We need our educators, our partners and the community to work together to build strong networks of support and opportunity for our young people, regardless of their backgrounds or family circumstances.
18. To the partners and schools already on this journey: I want to thank you for your time, care and commitment. The experiences and moments of discovery you have created will shape our students for years to come.
- Later on, we will hear more partnership stories later this evening, and I look forward to learning from them.
19. And to those considering how you might contribute, or contribute further, I hope you will join us. In doing so, we bring learning to life for more of our students and open up their minds to many other pathways.
20. Once again, thank you for being our partners in education. I wish you all a wonderful evening ahead.