Singapore’s education landscape has indisputably changed over the past few decades. These changes have been felt at all levels of schooling, and have encompassed not only revisions to subject syllabi but also wider turns in policy direction.

Why do all of these reforms matter to parents of school-age children? After all, aren’t schools and teachers well-equipped to take care of students and guide them through their schooling years?

This article will begin by outlining some of the major reforms that have swept through Singapore’s education system. It will then highlight the implications of these reforms for students and parents, before discussing some of the ways in which parents can best respond.

Education is a topic that most adults feel they are able to comment on. Almost everyone has been to school and remembers attending lessons in different subjects and enjoying extra- or co-curricular activities, along with sitting for tests and examinations.

It is easy enough for parents to urge their children to behave themselves and to ‘study hard’ in order to be able to get ‘a good job’ and ‘a better life’ upon leaving school. At the same time, some parents may feel that their children’s success in school is largely determined by the teachers’ ability to guide their students well, and also their children’s own ‘ability to study’.

However, it is important for parents to be aware that the context within which they attended school may be rather different from that facing their children. It is probably correct to say that the vast majority of parents of children who are currently in school attended primary and secondary school anywhere between the 1970s and the 2000s.

What are some of the ways in which the education landscape has changed since then?

Changes in the Education Landscape

The first is the much greater variety of schools and programmes, as part of a deliberate policy shift towards offering parents and students more diversity, flexibility and choice. A major signal in this direction came in the mid-1980s when the then Deputy Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong spoke of according school leaders greater operating autonomy. Over the next decade or so, the Ministry of Education allowed some secondary schools to become independent or autonomous schools. These schools were able to have more say in terms of matters such as student enrolment and the kinds of programmes they offered.

The 2000s saw the advent of integrated programmes that allowed the top 10 percent of each secondary age cohort to have six years of schooling without having to sit for any major national examination. At the same time, the secondary schooling landscape was further diversified over the next two decades with the emergence of new schools such as the School of the Arts and Crest Secondary School.

The post-secondary landscape has also been diversified with, for instance, the increase in the number of publicly-funded universities. Compared with two such universities in the 1990s, there are now six of them, with a seventh, the Singapore University of the Arts, poised to admit students in August this year.

Within primary and secondary schools, students have been allowed more diversity and choice in terms of niche programmes or Applied Learning programmes. Each school is allowed the flexibility to determine its own slate of such programmes and develop its particular areas of strength while providing possibilities for student development that most of their parents may not have had access to at that age.

Another major change has been in some of the structures that determine how students access schooling opportunities.

A prime driver of these changes in admission policies has been the official desire to address the long-standing issue of Singapore’s education system being overly fixated on academic grades. Another has been the recognition that academic grades alone will be insufficient to prepare students for the future challenges facing them in the workplace. These changes aim to send strong signals to schools, parents and students about the importance of skills and attributes such as leadership, communication and cross-cultural competencies. They also tie in with the greater latitude accorded individual schools to develop their own areas of strength.

In the 2000s, discretionary admission policies were introduced in publicly-funded universities, secondary schools, junior colleges and polytechnics. Probably the most well-known of these is the Direct School Admission scheme for secondary schools and junior colleges. This scheme allows students to apply for provisional admission, before sitting for the Primary School Leaving Examination or General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level Examination, on the basis of their talents or strengths in areas such as dance or sports. About 11 percent of the age cohort was admitted to secondary school in this manner in 2023.

Likewise, the Early Admissions Exercise for the Institute of Technical Education and Polytechnics allows students to secure admission on the basis of relevant skills and experiences. The publicly-funded universities have aptitude-based admissions policies, with the Nanyang Technological University admitting 57 percent of its first-year undergraduates in 2023 on this basis.

In addition, since 2013, the polytechnics have introduced a Polytechnic Foundation Programme that allows selected Secondary Four Normal (Academic) course students an alternative route to polytechnics by enrolling in a one-year practice-oriented curriculum.

Besides admission policies, the way in which students are able to have more flexibility and choice is through the replacement of streaming by subject-based banding at both primary and secondary levels. Most parents will be familiar with having been streamed at one or more points during their own school days. One of the major bugbears of the streaming system was its tendency to pigeonhole students within particular streams while not allowing for the reality of differing individual strengths and aptitudes in various subjects. The introduction of subject-based banding began in primary schools in 2008 and has now included secondary schools this year. Under subject-based banding, students are better able to take various subjects such as English language or science at a level that better meets their learning needs.

Another important change that has been introduced, this time within the last decade, is the reduction in the number of examinations at the primary and secondary levels. As with some of the other reforms that have been mentioned earlier, this change in assessment policy was meant to address the high levels of stress among both parents and students associated with testing and to move away from an over-emphasis on academic results. Mid-year examinations for all primary and secondary schools were removed by 2023, with junior colleges and Millennia Institute following suit this year. The official rationale for this reduction is to free up examination preparation time for self-directed learning and the development of 21st-century competencies.

Rethinking of Meritocracy

Underlying all these reforms over the past two decades has been what the Singapore government terms a ‘rethinking of meritocracy’, in which the idea of what constitutes ‘merit’ needs re-examination. Instead of a ‘meritocracy of grades’, in which a student’s academic accomplishments in the first two decades of life largely or solely determine his or her success in life, the government has suggested instead a few ways to reconceptualise ‘meritocracy’. The first is a ‘lifelong meritocracy’, which is linked with the active promotion over the past decade of lifelong learning. The second is a ‘meritocracy of skills’ that emphasises the acquisition of workplace-relevant skills. The third is an ‘inclusive meritocracy’, which allows for second chances as well as for different pathways to success. Next is a ‘compassionate meritocracy’ that attempts to blunt the harsher edges of an ideology that is in danger of encouraging an individualistic ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality. Another is a ‘contributory meritocracy’ in which individual success is gauged not on the sole basis of academic grades or career accomplishments but also on contributions to the wider society or the world.

Having outlined some of the major developments in Singapore’s education landscape over the past four decades, it is clear that many parents will feel bewildered when they confront the reality that schooling is no longer the same for their children as it once was for them. The approaches that these parents, and their own parents, adopted may not work as well for their own school-age children now.

For one thing, behind the apparent benefits of greater diversity, flexibility and choice for parents and students lies the question of what to do with all of this. The offer of more diversity, flexibility and choice will not benefit parents and students if they are unable or unwilling to make informed decisions and choices.

How then can parents best respond?

Informed decision-making involves a few stages: being aware that there are varied options; assembling the full variety of options; assessing the merits or disadvantages of each of the choices; and then making the final decision. The Ministry of Education is well aware of the need for informed decision-making and advises parents, for instance, to choose secondary schools judiciously by engaging in a three-stage process. The first involves parents talking to their children about their strengths, interests and learning styles. The second is to consider factors such as courses, programmes, subjects and co-curricular activities offered in various schools, along with school culture and transportation options. The third stage is about parents working with their children to shortlist schools based on their children’s strengths, interests and learning styles as well as schools’ Primary School Leaving Examination entry score ranges.

Not mentioned in this list is the role played by parental aspirations for their children. These aspirations do not appear suddenly at the end of primary schooling but are instead longer-term in nature. At the same time, aspirations are of little value if nothing is done to act on them. The decision to act affects fundamental matters such as parents’ perceptions of their roles in aiding their children’s educational success.

In the current education landscape, it may no longer be sufficient for parents to think of their roles as merely encouraging their children to ‘study hard’, ensuring that homework is completed regularly or even attending parent-teacher meetings regularly.

One clear case of this is the question of informed decision-making. For instance, when choosing a secondary school from among almost 150 schools, not only do parents need to get access to the necessary information about the diversity of secondary schools and admission schemes, they also need to know what to do with this information. How do they make sense of the options in order to arrive at a decision that best serves their child’s needs?

Another thing for parents to consider when trying to act on their aspirations is how they can mobilise their resources to support their children’s educational success. Many parents would probably think of how they can buy learning resources or tutoring services with their financial resources. But there is also the vital matter of accumulating knowledge of each of their children’s growth and development, both academic and non-academic. Yet another valuable resource is social networks, which are often a key way of getting access to information and evaluating choices. Such information may also include opportunities to help their children develop their talents, as in the case of the Junior Sports Academy, which offers selected Primary Four students up to two years of free-of-charge coaching in a variety of sports.

While some parents may still think that they can safely rely on their children’s teachers to help their children navigate the diversified education landscape, parents have to remember that teachers will likely never be able to have the same degree of intimate knowledge of their children’s personalities and talents, or the dreams and hopes for success, that parents possess. Parents may on occasion have to be active advocates for their children’s learning, for instance, through consultations with teachers about opportunities for talent development or the implications of education reforms for their children’s academic and non-academic learning.

The last few paragraphs have alluded to the existence in Singapore of what the British sociologist Phillip Brown termed a ‘parentocracy’, in which a child’s educational success is increasingly dependent on his or her parents’ wealth and wishes rather than on the child’s ability and effort. Some of the government’s attempts to rethink meritocracy and reform the education system acknowledge the existence of such inter-familial inequalities.

In summary, the ways in which the education system has evolved over the past few decades place parents of school-age children in a position where they have to exercise much more responsibility in ensuring their children’s educational success than was the case when they themselves underwent schooling a few decades ago. The potential benefits from greater diversity, flexibility and choice, along with the provision of multiple pathways to success, will be less realisable if parents do not confront this reality and take active steps in guiding their children’s growth and development.