Inside Singapore's World-Class Education System – TVNZ's Kate Nicol-Williams Explores

Flying over Singapore’s waters nearing the end of a 10-and-a-half-hour flight, my first insight into how the country was run came when I spotted a flotilla of cargo ships. The maritime industry is a big contributor to Singapore’s economy, but camera person Casey and I were feeling excited to see another important factor up close – the country’s high-performing education system. At a time when the New Zealand Government is progressing an overhaul in maths education to turn around the country’s persistent achievement slump, we were visiting one of the countries whose approach influenced the new curriculum. Singapore achieved the highest results in maths, science, and reading in the Programme for International Student Assessment run by the OECD in 2022.

In the lead-up to the trip, I was fascinated by Singapore’s economic success story. With few natural resources, Singapore’s founding Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, understood that lifting education quality would lead to a skilled workforce. Much like the strategically placed trees that we saw when heading from Changi Airport to the centre of the ‘garden city,’ education in Singapore is carefully planned and refined.

Because of the country’s small land size, schools have buildings that are stacked high with classrooms on different levels. At Yangzheng Primary School, there was still a range of spaces for sports and other activities. The turtles swimming in a small pond in the garden area stood out to me; the students posed no risk to their safety in a society where people generally follow the rules.

In one of the maths classes we saw, the teacher spoke to younger students with the mathematical language you might expect to hear in a class of older students. It was clear that receiving this instruction at a young age would help deepen their understanding and build their confidence in using the correct words.

We saw the Concrete Pictorial Approach in action – a model which helps students solve maths equations through the foundation of visualising them as concepts. At the concrete stage, there’s hands-on learning with blocks or other materials used to demonstrate an equation, in the pictorial stage, students visualise the concept with images on a worksheet or whiteboard and in the abstract stage, numbers and symbols are used to show maths problems.

Emeritus Professor Berinderjeet Kaur, an internationally recognised maths scholar at the National Institute of Education, told me while maths teachers use a range of teaching methods, like teachers in New Zealand, in Singapore, the CPA approach is “paramount.” Three out of four of the maths workbooks funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Education for primary and intermediate students this year incorporate this model.

At Yusof Ishak Secondary School, we saw students learning Malay and Chinese in language classes, which along with Tamil, form Singapore’s cornerstone education policy. Dr Neo Peng Fu, an Asian languages academic at National Institute of Education, says the compulsory subject has played an important role in helping citizens preserve their Asian identity, despite students being more at ease in English. The language a student learns aligns with their ethnicity. Māori Language Commissioner Rawinia Higgins later told me New Zealand can learn from how Singapore views identity as a fundamental aspect of their social, economic and political situation.

In both schools, students used education technology to access learning resources and complete tasks online. One of the latest developments of the Ministry of Education Singapore’s Student Learning Space online platform is AI learning features. We saw a student entering answers in Chinese receive instant feedback through AI on grammar and spelling. The Ministry says this will give teachers more time to focus on teaching complex language skills. This was also an example of Singapore’s focus on students developing competencies that will serve them well in a rapidly-changing world.  

Every interview provided another piece to the education puzzle. NIE’s Associate Professor Choy Ban Heng says there’s no secret recipe, but the country’s curriculum and quality of the teaching workforce are the main factors driving success.

The Ministry of Education, teachers and NIE work closely on devising updates to the curriculum. Having teachers working at the Ministry means they can contribute to policy that they know will work in the classroom, and then return to teach themselves. The same Government ruling since Singapore’s formation has contributed to the stability of the education system.

Singapore Teachers’ Union general secretary Mike Thiruman says the profession is highly competitive to enter, with high achieving students eligible to apply. He says this contributes to teaching quality and society respects their position. Thiruman told me teachers in Singapore wouldn’t leave the profession because of the pay they receive, but because of the expectations and stress of the role. “It is a highly demanding job.”

Choy stressed that a country’s individual context, the psyche of its people and its level of investment means the same approach of one country, might not be effective elsewhere. While sharing a focus on improving education, the systems of Singapore and New Zealand are very different in some aspects, for example when it comes to discipline and the use of assessment. Choy shared advice for New Zealand as a new maths approach is introduced, a year earlier than originally planned. “I think they need to go a little bit slower. Go slow in order to go far… teacher development is crucial because teachers are the agents of change.”

Kate Nicol-Williams published stories about Singapore's education system:

• What can NZ learn from Singapore's high performing maths education?

• What NZ can learn from Singapore's compulsory language education

• AI in schools 'something we can embrace'

-Asia Media Centre