Adaptivity in the Singapore Education System: Policy Developments Relating to Low Achievement
This chapter discusses the evolvement of low-achievement policy in Singapore as the education system adapts to changing manpower needs of the times. It argues that the earlier phases of education (survival-driven phase and efficiency-driven phase) were ch
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Adaptivity in the Singapore Education System: Policy Developments Relating to Low Achievement Siao See Teng, Li-Yi Wang, and Ching Leen Chiam
Introduction The Singapore education system has been highly adaptable to the times and demands of globalisation and nation-building. Post-independent Singapore has been governed by a political party deeply conscious of its lack of natural resources and which since the early nation-building days regarded its people as Singapore’s most valuable resource with much investment on education to cater to manpower needs. In the continual pursuit of improvement in its education system, tackling low achievement has been a feature in the development of educational policies in Singapore. While concern for low achievers’1 performance alone is not the reason for the changes in Singapore’s education policies over the years, key reforms in the Singapore education has entailed describing and prescribing the situation relating to low achievement to a great extent, and this, in turn, in one way or another significantly impact low achievers. The highly adaptable educational system of Singapore operates consistently on an economic instrumentalism (Gopinathan, 2001) which adapts according to the political and economic needs of the times. This economic instrumentalism is thus embedded in how low achievement is scoped and tackled in Singapore’s education system. This chapter discusses how policies relating to low achievers evolve within the Singapore education system and also draw implications about possible future directions policies could further develop towards. It first examines how low achievement 1
Throughout this chapter, the term low-achieving (LA) students is used to describe those who perform least well at standardised examinations or are anticipated to do so in Singapore. They include children at risk of dropping out of schools, Primary 1 and 2 pupils who are low attainers of English and Mathematics and attend Learning Support Programmes, and the lowest performing students at the Primary School Leaving Examination (approximately 11–12 % or 5,000–6,000 students of each year’s cohort students) who are streamed into the Normal Technical stream. S.S. Teng (*) • L.-Y. Wang • C.L. Chiam National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] D. Hung et al. (eds.), Adaptivity as a Transformative Disposition: For Learning in the 21st Century, Springer Education Innovation Book Series, DOI 10.1007/978-981-4560-17-7_14, © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2014
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is perceived and dealt with through key education policies and initiatives across different phases of education, delineating (1) how a systemic approach was embraced during the initial reforms with the introduction of a diversification of the curriculum in terms of academic streaming to reduce attrition rates and produce a more educated workforce; and (2) how further diversification in educational pathways and pedagogies with the intention o
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