Singapore’s educational export strategies: ‘branding’ and ‘selling’ education in a favourable global policy marketspace

ABSTRACT

Since the 1990s, Singapore has firmly established its reputation in the global education policy space as one of the best education systems in the world. However, existing policy transfer literature on Singapore has been mainly interested in Singapore as a decontextualised, ahistorical case, rather than as a unique player in the global education policy sphere. Analysis of how Singapore’s educational policies and lessons have been exported to other countries tends to focus on the mediating roles of international assessments and global policy actors like the OECD or McKinsey consultants. What has been much less clear is Singapore’s own proactive branding and education export strategies. Guided by the Cultural Political Economy framework, this paper draws attention to how an enabling global education policy context with an insatiable appetite for fast policy lessons has aligned with Singapore’s own initiatives to cultivate and export its brand of educational success.

摘要

自20世纪90年代以来，新加坡在全球教育政策领域中确立了良好声誉，被称为世界上最好的教育制度之一。然而，现有关于新加坡政策转移文献之主要旨趣在于将其视作一个剥离了情境与历史背景的案例，而非全球教育政策领域中的独特主体。围绕新加坡教育政策及经验如何输出的分析倾向于聚焦国际评估项目与全球政策主体（如经合组织或麦肯锡顾问）所扮演的中介作用，而对新加坡本国的主动品牌推广与教育输出策略知之甚少。本文借鉴“文化政治经济”框架，审视一个狂热追求快速政策经验的全球教育政策背景如何与新加坡自身对其教育成功的品牌塑造与输出计划相互促进。

KEYWORDS:

• Global education policy
• policy borrowing
• policy travelling
• policy lending
• fast policy
• cultural political economy
• global governance
• mechanisms
• Singapore

关键词:

• 全球教育政策
• 政策借鉴
• 政策迁移
• 政策传播
• 快速政策
• 文化政治经济
• 全球治理
• 机制
• 新加坡

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This paper stems from a prior report on understanding Singapore’s educational success as well as how features of this model have been exported abroad (Le and Edwards 2021). For more details on the methodology, please refer to the original report.