Policy and pedagogical reforms in Singapore: Taking stock, moving forward

Introduction

The rapid and arguably remarkable transformation of Singapore from a British colony and trading port, subjected to the ordeals of the World War II in the Pacific and the Japanese Occupation from 1942 to 1945, forced into independence in 1965 by the failure of a merger with Malaysia, and evolving from Third World to the First as the founding Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew puts it, has been documented in countless books and articles (e.g., Gopinathan, 2015). At the core of Singapore’s economic development has been the critical role that education has played, and continues to do so (Shanmugaratnam, 2008). To understand Singapore’s transformation is to understand the interplay between education, economy, society, and globalization, given how plugged in the nation-state is into the complex networked space of global flows (Castells, 1996). Its education has constantly evolved to meet the changing demands of the country, with educational policies designed to attend to national, societal and global economic challenges. Singapore’s educational changes and reforms have been seen as contributing success factors with Singapore education system’s top ranking performance over the years in international assessments such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). But scholars have espoused the need for a “careful consideration of the social, cultural and institutional contexts of a high-performing system, which many scholars have argued, is crucial for understanding the educational success of a country” (Deng & Gopinathan, 2016, p. 458).

Educational reforms and changes need to be further contextualized within a longer frame of history to understand the nuanced workings of policy and pedagogical reforms as well as their impact and consequences. While reforms indicate the introduction of something new, they are built on prior educational trajectories, developments and legacies – they are products of distinctive histories of schooling, social problems, political and economic demands. Notwithstanding the increasingly global exchange of knowledge and circulation of ideas, there are limits to policy borrowing and policy solutions that stem from other educational systems (Burdett & O’Donnell, 2016; Steiner-Khamsi & Waldow, 2012; Tan, 2016). Granted, international and comparative research and sociology of education (e.g., Cowen & Kazamias, 2009; Mehta & Davies, 2018; Rizvi & Lingard, 2010) suggest some common challenges most if not all systems face: decreasing educational funding; continuous tensions between key social institutions (state, school, industry, religion) due to structural or ideological reasons; pathways from school to further education and work in flux and limiting to those who lack access to various forms of capital; erosion of professional autonomies for schools and teachers; persistence of institutional mechanisms of accountability and performativity; increasing separation of education, social, economic, and health policies leading to less-than-optimal educational experiences and learning conditions for children already at risk. Some of these challenges manifest in localized ways in Singapore’s context, with efforts to address them through educational policy and pedagogical reforms post-Independence in 1965. Unlike other countries where the course of education could be altered dramatically with a single change of political governance, the relative stability of political rule by the Singapore’s reigning party, the People’s Action Party (PAP), since independence meant an evolutionary development in educational policies. As a very local response, under PAP’s governance, an instrumental approach to education has long been harnessed to produce human capital in the nation-state that lacks natural resources. Thus, educational change and reforms are often determined by changing economic demands, and education more than any other social institution is the key tool used to shape society. Over more than five decades, the Singaporean school is, and continues to be, where young citizens are effectively socialized and skilled for economic and civic roles. In this time, Singapore’s political stability has led to the government’s long-term vision of using education to strengthen state capacities and to shape modern Singapore, tackling multiple educational challenges along the way.

Yet, with existing challenges unresolved, new challenges emerge, and wicked problems continue to persist. Goh and Gopinathan (2008) and Gopinathan (2015) have described the stages of educational development in Singapore in four distinct phases, from “survival-driven” reforms (1965–1978), to “efficiency-driven” reforms (1978–1997), to “ability-driven” reforms (1997–2011), to “student-centric, values-driven” reforms (2011-present). Each phase was responsive to the social, economic and political contexts of the time of its introduction, with each building on, or evolving from, the previous phase. Seen across the decades, these educational developments were attempts to shift Singapore’s industrial and manufacturing economy to a thriving ‘semiotic economy’: “an economy based around codes, signs and symbols – where the lion’s share of productive work and consumption, and lifestyle and community membership is based on linguistic and communicative competence, information and capital flows, and engagement with new media and technologies” (Abu Bakar, Nozaki, & Luke, 2006, p. 469–470). If there is a recurring theme for Singapore’s educational policy and pedagogical reforms, it is that change and continuity exist in tandem. Reforms never work in a vacuum and often seek to bring about change, even while underlying reform principles may continue to remain constant, and educational challenges continue to persist. Thus, we see the playing out of tensions, between neoliberal pressures to produce human capital and humanistic and democratic imperatives to holistically nurture the individual, and between centralization and decentralization as the Singapore education system responds to global economic developments as well as social equity challenges. It is in this context of Singapore as a hothouse of economic transformation, and an educational landscape in an ongoing formation and transition, that we can speak of reform, innovation, improvement and change in the nation-state’s education policies and pedagogies.

This special issue brings together a set of papers that deliberate on policy and pedagogical reforms that have informed current educational developments and practices, as well as delineate possible responses to both new and persistent challenges. The papers cover a range of topics, from those that entail broader policy analysis in assessment, vocational education and comparative education, to examining teacher professional development policies and their consequences, to new pedagogical innovations in inquiry-based learning in humanities and the arts, and new ways of rethinking Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) policies. Uniquely, the contributors of this issue are researchers from Singapore’s sole research-intensive teacher-training institution, the National Institute of Education, all of whom have conducted extensive research on the ground with local schools and educational stakeholders in the system, and some have engaged closely and responsively with policymakers from Singapore’s Ministry of Education. All the contributors have attempted to see how their research not only inform, or shed light on, key policy concerns. Such research can contribute to teacher education programmes, teacher professional development, and classroom practices through educational intermediaries set up within the Singapore educational ecology precisely to facilitate the translation and dissemination of research into usable knowledge for practitioners. The fact that the contributors are ‘local’ provides a degree of local ownership of the research, but importantly, this special issue hopes to contribute at least one voice towards new or ongoing educational policy conversations locally and globally, and be a modest conduit through which research ideas and discourses can enter policy thinking, particularly in Singapore and Asia.

We invited contributors to provide empirical, conceptual, theoretical and comparative perspectives on major educational policy and pedagogical reforms in Singapore, especially since the major reform called “Thinking Schools, Learning Nation” (TSLN) in 1997 (Goh, 1997; Tan & Ng, 2008). TSLN was a major turning point in educational policies, and arose as a direct response to a national preoccupation with the future, the impact of globalization and the consequences of increased economic competition. Ambitious in its vision, then-Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong drew from American educational exemplars to argue that Singapore education needed to develop critical thinking skills, nurture well-rounded, innovative students, generate lifelong learning passion, foster commitment to the nation, not just in schools but across every level of society. Since 1997, a series of wide-ranging policy and pedagogical reforms have been implemented that changed school management and infrastructure, provided resources to schools and the public to address systemic concerns such as inequality, learning difficulties, and the challenges of lifelong learning. These reforms reached across all levels of the education system, including teacher professional development, the creation of networked learning communities, the formation of research-practice-policy partnerships, improving vocational education, assessment practices, inquiry-based learning, STEM education, and humanities and arts education. Over the last decade, in particular, concerns about the future economy, lifelong learning, social inequality, and early childhood education have surfaced, leading to government initiatives such as the SkillsFuture initiative (Ang, 2018) to provide lifelong skills mastery, and the KidStart programme that provides an ‘ecosystem of support’ for struggling families (Early Childhood Development Agency, n.d.). Along with an ongoing anxiety over bilingual education and a continued need to improve classroom pedagogies, these suggest a system that is in continuous evolution as it is subjected to top-down imperatives and bottom-up needs from schools and society. In recent years, discourses around the advent of the fourth industrial revolution and the urgency for education to address a future-ready workforce have prompted the need to re-examine the relationships between education, learning, schooling, economy, society and the future. The special issue seeks to not only document recent policy and pedagogical reforms but to critically discuss their consequences, underlying principles, policy gaps and suggest new or alternative ways of rethinking education in Singapore.

Contributions

The first two papers “Changing Assessments and the Examination Culture in Singapore: A Review and Analysis of Singapore’s Assessment Policies” authored by Hwei Ming Wong, Dennis Kwek and Kevin Tan, and “Education Reforms within Neoliberal Paradigms: A Comparative Look at the Singaporean and Finnish Education Systems” by Siao See Teng, Mardiana Abu Bakar and Heidi Layne, adopt a macro-level analysis to educational reforms. The former offers a detailed critical review of assessment policies in Singapore from colonial times to the present, noting how policy layering and policy conversion lead to both assessment changes and systemic tensions. It also positions parents as significant policy actors who could pose challenges to policy implementation and highlights the relevance of parent assessment literacy. The latter compares two highly regarded education systems, Finland and Singapore, which in spite of embracing neoliberal practices, have forged differing relationships between trust and accountability that have a lasting impact on reforms, teacher professionalism and agency. It argues for the need to move from performative accountability to intelligent accountability as well as balancing it with a culture of trust in order to fulfil the potential and ensure the sustainability of education reforms.

The next two papers “Enduring Issues within Singapore’s TVET” by Mardiana Abu Bakar, Aznan Abu Bakar and Boon Yong Kwok and “STEM as Opportunity to get TSLN right: Science Education for Economically Productive Creativity” by Michael Tan, present two important aspects of education – preparation for a technical and vocational, and STEM workforces, respectively. Mardiana and co-authors provide rare insights on Singapore’s educational reforms in Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) and the various institutions that operate under it. They question the place of TVET in Singapore’s education system given its invisibility in key educational reforms such as TSLN, and argue that even though the education system has progressively shifted towards recasting knowledge tied to skills as a means for developing abilities, and even while the Singapore SkillsFuture initiative is arguably the most ambitious TVET-related reform to date, broader systemic issues of equal opportunities and social mobility continue to shape talent development and the vocational identities of lifelong learners. Michael Tan’s paper urges us to pause in our tracks in the rush to promote Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education to feed the economic agenda, specifically generating a STEM-ready workforce. Debunking the existing rationales for an economy-driven STEM education, he argues that the humanities have much to offer STEM practitioners and a role to play in the nurturing of creative skills and other valued skills. He proposes a holistic STEM curriculum using a humanistic pedagogy that integrates the humanities into the discipline. Tan believes this approach to STEM offers a way to achieve the promises of TSLN as outlined above.

As curriculum enactors, teachers are at the heart of education reform and change. Thus, teacher agency and professional development is the focus of Hairon Salleh’s “Back to the Future: Professional Learning Communities in Singapore”, Imran Sha’ari’s “Lateral Networks of Teachers in a Centralised Education System: Structures, Processes and Development of Teacher Agency” and Shu Shing Lee “Teacher Learning from a Socio-cultural Lens: A Case from Singapore”. The three papers converge on exploring teacher agency in a centralized-decentralized system. In Hairon’s review of the developments of professional learning communities (PLCs) over the years, he observes how TSLN has introduced ideas of school autonomy to facilitate pedagogical and curricular innovations and thus also provided more space for teachers to be more agentive actors. He notes that the policies on teacher learning have been driven by research on effective professional development, learning organizations, and system sciences. Such research has led to the provision of institutional structures to facilitate and drive the policy reforms, such as the creation of the Academy of Singapore Teachers in 2010. Noting that more can be done to improve teacher learning, Hairon proposes four reform levers to strengthen current developments in PLCs: deepening the sense of community in professional learning communities, strengthening teacher leadership, taking a systems approach to developing learning communities across all levels (group, school, network) and enhancing teacher agency within, and through, the learning communities.

Sha’ari and Lee present empirical data on the processes of teacher learning in their papers on teacher learning networks and situated learning, respectively. Through observations of the processes of two teacher networks, one more formalized and the other more of a ground-up initiative, Sha’ari offers a perspective on how professional learning/development and teacher agency could take place in a centralized system. He argues that lateral networks could bring about conditions conducive to encourage teacher agency, even if the network itself was not initially initiated by the teachers themselves as the experimental nature of the networks allow space for teachers’ negotiation that could lead to a redefining of the original goals that could be meaningful for themselves. Sha’ari’s paper complements Hairon’s analysis of PLCs by examining how network characteristics and processes develop teacher agencies in experimenting with pedagogical innovations. Lee’s paper examines situated teacher learning, and provides another perspective into the nature of teacher learning in Singapore. In her case study, Lee described the way teachers learn in a community to design pedagogical innovations and enact student-centred practices, often seen to be a challenge in the face of the dominant teacher-centred pedagogic script (Gutierrez, Rymes, & Larson, 1995). Through collective, reflective inquiry, teachers within a community were able to navigate and negotiate the demands of school and policy contexts, and create sociocultural supports to address challenges that they faced.

Finally, as a relatively new pedagogical form, inquiry as a practice is not limited to teachers as described in Lee’s case study. Mark Baildon and Pamela Onishi in their paper “Moving Inquiry-based Learning Forward: A Meta-synthesis on Inquiry-based Classroom Practices for Pedagogical Innovation and School Improvement in the Humanities and Arts” argue for a comprehensive ecological approach to Inquiry-based Learning (IBL) in the Singapore humanities and arts classrooms, seen to be largely teacher-centred and transmissionistic in nature. Despite efforts to nurture creative and critical skills since TSLN, systemic challenges to IBL remain, evident from the disconnect between reform discourses and actual classroom enactments. Baildon and Onishi’s meta-synthesis shows that teacher and student agencies are critical to successful student-driven inquiry, and to implement IBL effectively, building an inquiry culture, mindsets and social practice are important to address the broader challenges to inquiry-based instruction.

Moving forward

The capacity of a government to make and implement effective policies is dependent on the policy capacities that it has access to. Drawn from public policy research, policy capacity is “the set of skills and resources – or competences and capabilities – necessary to perform policy functions” (Wu, Ramesh, & Howlett, 2015, p. 166). The increasing complexities of policy problems, some of which are persistent and some sudden, are creating significant challenges to governments to make policy decisions, implement and assess policies, and importantly, make use of knowledge in policy decision-making. As this editorial is written, the COVID-19 pandemic has been raging for months and has brought about health, financial, and educational crises to individuals and societies. The pandemic has presented many governments with an unexpected and unanticipated systemic problem, a black swan event, that has brought to the fore governments’ capacities to implement decisive policies to tackle it (Woo, 2020). In the education context, many persistent educational challenges have resulted in continuous attempts through policy and pedagogical reforms to address them. Singapore’s major educational policy reforms triggered, for example, by the Goh Report in 1979 (Ministry of Education, 1979) and the TSLN initiative in 1997 (Goh, 1997) are examples of the government’s efforts to build up the resources, competences, capabilities and political legitimacy to implement policy solutions to address a broad range of systemic problems, from student attrition to developing an economically viable workforce. The success in the 1980s to stem school dropout rates is indicative of the presence of a number of policy capacities that were mobilized to address the challenge. In the context of the Singapore education system, specific policy capacities are at play – operational, fiscal, analytical and political capacities. Operational capacity creates and aligns resources with policy actions so that policies can be implemented. Fiscal capacity is predicated on the government’s financial ability to fund policy implementations. Analytical capacity “help to ensure policy actions are technically sound in the sense they can contribute to attainment of policy goals if carried out” (Wu et al., 2015, p. 168). Political capacity generates and garners political support for policy actions, including the use of public communications to do so (Woo, 2020).

What becomes clear across the papers in this special issue is the presence of operational and fiscal capacities to implement the various policy and pedagogical reforms over the past few decades. The creation and continuous upgrading of schools and school infrastructures (including technological upgrades), the setting up of an institution such as the Academy of Singapore Teachers that specializes in teacher professional development, the creation of learning communities within and across schools, the development of vocational education pathways including the setting up of the Institute of Technical Education, the significant funding of the SkillsFuture initiative to encourage lifelong learning (Woo, 2017) – all these are evidence of the government’s operational and fiscal capacities to implement policy reforms to change the educational landscape in Singapore. The government’s spending on education was S$12.8 billion in 2018, a 70% increase from 2007 (Singapore Budget, 2020), signalling not only a healthy fiscal capacity but a continued investment and prioritizing of education. Political capacity in Singapore comprises political trust and legitimacy and public communications, according to Woo (2020). As a developmental state (Gopinathan, 2015), Singaporeans exhibit a relatively high degree of political trust compared to many other countries, due in part to the government’s ability to ensure economic growth, social stability, and the continuous mobilization of education to facilitate social mobility (Woo, 2018). The roll-out of new educational policy reforms is always accompanied by communication efforts to the general public through news media channels to ensure that parents are aware of the broad policy directions and impact on their children’s education.

Where issues arise in policy and pedagogical reforms may be attributed to gaps in analytical capacity, rather than the other policy capacities. The persistence of systemic tensions continues to be a thorny issue in Singapore education, one that appears to pose challenges to the innovations and reforms described in many of the papers in this special issue. The authors suggest the need to enhance the analytical capacity by critically utilizing a comprehensive approach to educational issues – terms such as “holistic”, “systemic”, “system-wide”, “ecological” are apparent in the papers. For example, high-stakes assessment is a key constraint to fulfiling the objectives of reforms documented by a number of authors here. Wong et al. note the systemic tensions between high-stakes national assessment and Assessment-for-Learning policies given the entrenched examination culture in Singapore. Teng et al., Tan, and Baildon and Onishi likewise observe how high-stakes testing poses huge constraints on pedagogical innovations. In the domain of TVET, Mardiana et al. point to the tension between the growing emphasis on generic and soft skills in the restructuring of vocational education but with fewer teaching and learning hours allocated to facilitate such skills development. Imran and Lee shift attention from systemic issues to tensions encountered by teachers who need to work with the realities of a centralized education system. Not all tensions lead to educational problems, however. Imran and Lee argue that differences and tensions can be constructive to teacher learning and agency.

Three other points emerge from the papers that are important in providing deeper insights which can contribute to analytical capacity for policy thinking. First, the idea of ‘community’ and the need to engage stakeholders both within and outside of the education sector is a strong theme across the papers. Wong et al. delineate how the official attempt to shift from performative assessment to a holistic one is confronted with resistance by parents brought up under the high-stakes examination culture. The authors argue that parents should be seen to be policy actors who could contribute to successful policy implementation, advocating that parental assessment literacy is one approach to do so. Hairon and Sha’ari emphasize the development of teacher communities to strengthen teacher agency and professional capacities. Lee expands on this by arguing that teacher communities need to experience collective inquiry and create sociocultural supports to enable situated teacher learning. Second, in line with community building is the need to focus on building cultures of trust. Unlike operational and fiscal capacities, culture building is a long-term process that goes beyond infrastructural provisions (such as learning communities); it requires rethinking how to dismantle power distances and deeply entrenched hierarchical relationships. Hairon writes about the need for a high degree of trust where members of learning communities can question without feeling threatened, and where all levels of the education system can work together productively to cultivate collegial and collaborative relationships. Teng et al. remind us that a culture of trust and intelligent accountability should go hand in hand. Performative accountability could compel teachers to see themselves as curriculum implementers rather than innovators in order to abide by narrow accountability indicators. Its unidirectional nature holds teachers accountable to their school leaders and the education system. Intelligent accountability entails mutual accountability where school leaders and policy makers are as accountable to teachers and students as well as vice versa. Third, when policy and pedagogical reforms continue to run into resistance, or when the underlying policy ideas are not fulfilled despite best intentions, there is a need to re-imagine policy alternatives in ways that require a deep examination of fundamental assumptions underlying the policy problems and policy solutions. One approach is to draw in interdisciplinary ideas, theories and methodologies that transcend educational disciplinary boundaries. The use of philosophy of education in Tan’s paper, the use of institutional theory in Wong et al.’s paper, the meta-synthesis methodology of Baildon and Onishi, all provide new ways of envisioning policy alternatives that may provide inroads into breaking down policy challenges.

This last point is worth expanding on, given recent local and global pressures on universities to make education research ‘impactful’ (Whitty, 2006, 2016). By this is the assumption that research findings must be useful to inform policy decision-making, teaching practices, or teacher education programmes. While relevance is undoubtedly a key factor in education research (Rickinson, Sebba, & Edwards, 2011), a narrow focus on use may be detrimental to education and teachers, especially given that teaching, learning, and schooling are becoming increasingly complex matters in the face of globalization. As Black and Wiliam (2003, p. 632) argue:

We do not believe that all educational research should be useful, for two reasons. The first is that, just as most research in the humanities is not conducted because it is useful, we believe that there should be scope for some research in education to be absolutely uninterested in considerations of use. The second reason is that it is impossible to state, with any certainty, which research will be useful in the future. Having said this, we believe strongly that the majority of research in education should be undertaken with a view to improving educational provision.

Geoff Whitty makes a further case regarding the relationship between research, policy and practice: “ … [an education] field defined too narrowly would provide a very limited evidence base for improving an education system and informing a teaching profession facing the challenges of a rapidly changing world, where what works today may not work tomorrow. It is important and even useful, therefore, for educational research to be able to ask other sorts of questions as well as ‘what works’, if only why something works and why it works in some contexts and not in others” (2016, p.9).

This special issue highlights the conceptual and methodological diversity that can be brought to bear on policy and pedagogical reforms in Singapore’s education system. Studies on policy reforms tend to focus on empirical, often large-scale, evaluations of policy implementations and consequences (e.g., Ryan & Cousin, 2009; Sykes, Schneider, Plank, & Ford, 2009). This issue hopes to take a broader view of education research in asking the different sorts of questions, conducting research that question prevailing assumptions, making the case that sustained and impactful change requires meaningful and in-depth knowledge that requires excavation and re-examination, and effectively contributing to the analytical capacities that can generate policy solutions that are worth pursuing. Consequently, for policymakers, education research can be a means to understand and reconsider key educational issues, to think differently, to reconceptualize what the problems are, to challenge old assumptions and critically examine policy biases and consequences. Likewise, for practitioners, education research can provide not only usable, practical and pedagogical knowledge and strategies, but can be a means to expose personal biases, assumptions and prejudices, and to achieve Bildung – “the formation of self and the cultivation of human powers or dispositions and values through interactions with knowledge and culture” (Deng, 2018, p. 336).