Will the new PSLE scoring change anything?

So, a new period has begun. Entry to secondary schools will not be by T-Score but by Achievement Levels (AL) and the sum of ALs over the 4 subjects the students will have to take.

Many people have written to explain the system. You can find one here from ST. MOE provided the list of indicative cut-off points for secondary schools by AL. There are enough experts analysing the system and how best to achieve the desired scores to go to the ‘best’ schools. The system looks confusing now, because it is new and people do not quite understand the implications of how it will actually affect entry into schools which will be based on actual demand for and supply of places.

Will it change the anxiety over this deemed high-stake examinations? My short answer is, NO.

No; as long as parents still believe that there are some schools more desirable than others, that there are some academic streams better for their children, there will be anxiety. Some will have good reasons to believe so and many will still go by what we instinctively think as humans – the harder to get in, the better it must be. With limited places in the desired schools, there will still be the pressure at PLSE, at the tender age of 12. For now, the new system will actually add more anxiety until people figure out what it will actually take to get to what schools. There will be no change in anxiety level unless there is a mindset change of parents, and other accompanying policy changes to other aspects of our schools and even in society.

When I was in school, we did not quite care which schools we went to. My parents, both Chinese teachers, sent my brothers and me to St. Stephen’s School, a mission school near our home because it would provide the English speaking environment we would not get at home. The late Mr Lee KY had already made it clear that English will be the main medium for business, so my parents figured that for us to succeed in Singapore, we have to be good with our English. When it came to secondary school, almost the entire cohort chose the affiliated St. Patrick;s School nearby. We just wanted to be with friends and we wanted to be in a school near our homes. Hardly anyone looked at branding of schools nor how others perceive the schools. We turned out well. The top student in the entire east of Singapore for my O level year came from St. Patrick’s. Many went on to become lawyers, doctors, dentists, successful businessmen and some went quite high in the government service. Many went on to receive scholarships for their university studies.

The most significant change ever made to our education system since independence were the reforms sparked by the Goh report in the late 1970s. Dr Goh Keng Swee, the fixer for ministries with problems, was sent to rectify the problem of low education levels and high drop-out rates. As a trained engineer and with limited resources of the country, he figured the best solution was to stream students to what suits them best so that we could produce workers for the MNCs and whatever was necessary for our economy. Harsh as the system was, it produced results. Drop out rates fell drastically. Those deemed less academic could take up the more hands-on courses. Continued reforms after that tinkered with the formula.

We started to have more experimentation – Special Assistance Plan schools specialising in the Chinese language (which of course attracted almost entirely Chinese students), gifted steam (initially at both primary and secondary levels, and later with the proliferation of independent secondary schools with their own programmes to stretch high ability students, the gifted programme was dropped for secondary schools), autonomous schools, through-train secondary to JC, and so on. Schools were resourced differently to fit their cohorts. Some schools became very well resourced, both from state funding and from a strong alumni. The contrast between the haves and have-nots became quite stark.

I thought the worst thing that happened was when we started to rank and brand schools. It was first started in 1992, published by our national newspaper Straits Times. The exercise went on for two decades, with tinkering of the criteria along the way, but nevertheless, schools were publicly honoured and of course, those left out of the published rankings were deemed not-so-good, to put it mildly in the perception of the public. There were other ways MOE started to measure schools such as PRISM (“Performance Indicators for School Management”), banding of schools instead of by absolute score (as schools started fighting hard for the extra score to the decimal points to be up the ranking). Whatever the tinkering, the layman would just rely on the list and start to push their children to be in top ranked schools, as high up the ranking as they could. Even though the listing has been stopped (thankfully), the damage of such a prolong exercise has been done. Others continue to publish their unofficial ranking of schools in the absence of that by MOE, using various criteria of their own. The most simplistic is to look at the cut-off points for admission of schools at secondary 1 and JC 1, which to me does not say very much actually. I find it quite sad that people do not look at what schools that take in lower scoring students had been able to transform or value-add to students. A JC that takes in 5-6 pointers students will obviously have to ensure that vast majority, if not all will make it to ‘good’ universities. The JCs that take in average scoring O levels students but enabling many of them to do well for university admissions should be lauded more.

A ridiculous exercise my own children had to go through in secondary 1 many years ago was that they were given a slip by MOE stating their PSLE score and their expected score for O levels. My children did not have sterling PLSE scores. They went to neighbour schools. We told our children to chuck that paper away and not to let other people limit them by what the computer system would predict their future scores to be. All three of them turned out much better at O levels than the predictions. I still do not quite understand why MOE thought the exercise was necessary. It was perhaps that entrenched mindset that students are like factory products – after sorting out at PSLE, that would be where they were expected to be at the end of the current factory line before moving on to the next factory.

Singapore has taken the Goh’s report sorting exercise too far. Some steps had been taken in more recent years to undo the unhealthy competition and what I had termed in parliament in my maiden speech (Oct 2011) as ‘hyper-meritocracy’ (Heng Swee Kiat later used another term ‘extreme meritocracy’ but had the same meaning). Education is a lot more than just what the student achieve in academic results and what schools they attend. My wife and I had no issues with our children going to neighbour primary and secondary schools. We opted them out of the gifted education test. As concerned parents like many others, we do try to help with whatever they feel they need help in, but otherwise we let them have their own space to grow. We are thankful that they turned out well. One went through the polytechnic route while the other two went through neighbourhood JCs. All ended up eventually in our local autonomous universities and have found what they want to do in life, a very important thing to us as parents.

I had pushed many times in parliament (2015, 2014, 2013, 2012) and in the WP 2015 manifesto for through-train primary to secondary pilot schools. I would have gladly sent my children to such schools even if there was no option for them to enter a top secondary schools through this path. 10 years would be a good time for the school to development the students holistically till they were of the age to better know what would work for them. Our society has come a long way since the Goh’s report of 1978 that necessitated mass sorting out of students. We need to constantly focus on the core purpose of education – to develop each child to bring out the best in them. I end this blog with one of my favourite quote on education, for which I had also written a blog post several years ago – What should be the focus of our education?

The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate “apparently ordinary” people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people. ~K. Patricia Cross, Education Scholar

Parents – anxious as we are about how to deal with the new PSLE scoring and what schools / academic streams we want our children to be in, do remember to invest time into their development, and to encourage them even if they do not end up where you hope for them to be in. Parents hold their children’s hands for a while, and hopefully their hearts forever.

Having an Official Leader of the Opposition

In a recent Facebook post, the retired ESM Goh Chok Tong called the official appointment of Pritam as Leader of the Opposition a “very significant move” by PM Lee. Mr Goh added: “Our opposition MPs and NCMPs will now have to go beyond merely serving as a check-and-balance. They can put forward their alternative policies and solutions so that Singaporeans would know the choices available, besides the Government’s.”

Mr Goh must have been in parliament when the WP proposed our alternative A Dynamic Population For A Sustainable Singapore, or when we proposed our alternative model for ministerial salaries. I was deeply involved in those. I had also presented various proposals in education and early childhood during my time in parliament, amongst others. Most of what I had proposed for reforms to the early childhood sector have now been adopted in one form or another. When I had proposed them early in my parliament term, the proposals were new at that time. Perhaps others had proposed similar policy transformation to the sector that I had called for, but not in parliament before I did, unless I am mistaken. I am not claiming credit for proposing these persistently. Just because the government does not acknowledge our contributions when changes were made does not mean that the opposition did not propose anything.

Similarly, I had persistently called for all primary schools to have Student Care inside the school, and the proposal was brushed aside. I went through extensive effort on my own to even call many existing SC centres within schools to better understand the situation of urgent shortage of places. Some time later, MOE announced that all primary schools would eventually have SC centres. I was the first to propose in parliament that we could implement laws to punish companies outside of Singapore for transboundary haze. That was eventually done. There were many other proposals I had made which are not yet implemented but I hope will eventually be. These include through-train primary to secondary schools and smaller class sizes.

The WP had also made various significant proposals, done with extensive consultation with industry experts. These include Redundancy Insurance and alternatives to the HDB decaying lease issue. There are other policy ideas, proposed within parliament and outside (for those like myself who are now not in parliament).

Sure, the move to have an official Leader of the Opposition with government-funded staffing and resources is a significant first step. I hope data and the intent behind impending policy changes can be shared more openly with those in the opposition. In my time in parliament, I often had to probe and dig, and use various creative ways to file parliamentary questions because we sometimes get evasive answers. I cite my probe into scholarships for foreign students as one example. You can google for more details on this topic and judge for yourself by looking at the answers that I had been given.

I hope the 14th parliament will be a better experience for the opposition MPs. I am writing this to dispute that WP is just check and balance, that we just nudge the government to do a bit better here and there.

I think if there is to be a more significant change, it should be that elected opposition MPs must be allowed to use grassroots facilities, particularly the PA resources and decide on use of Community Improvement Funds. There is absolutely no need for the PAP to appoint their grassroots advisor. There is no need for WP elected MPs to have to get permission from GRAs for use of community funds from taxpapers’ monies. Contrary to what some try to portray that GRAs are doing the ‘sai kang’ or dirty work on behalf of residents, the Town Council where the real ‘sai kang’ are, is run by the elected MPs. GRAs basically just give the PAP a foothold in the constituency to launch their attack at the next election. There is no need for GRAs to have to write letters on behalf of residents when those by elected opposition MPs will suffice.

The road to a first world parliament continues. Let’s us continue to do more. A big ‘thank you’ to Singaporeans whose determination to see a fairer political system is now bearing some fruits.

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Note: This article was first written as a Facebook post and re-posted here (with minor edits) for easier future referencing.

Singapore’s Post Covid-19 Future

Prime Minister Lee addressed the nation yesterday on Singapore’s future in a post COVID-19 world. His speech is the first in a series of national broadcasts with five other Cabinet ministers laying out future plans for the country.

I have a few areas which I’d like to see for Singapore post Covid-19.

(1) First is on domestic wage reforms. Business leader Ho Kwon Ping brought this issue up in an IPS talk in 2012. He presented data in a refreshing way. Ho asked IPS to compile data on the wages of various professions across 9 of the most developed economies in the world.

The finding? Singapore is the MOST UNEQUAL of all developed nations. On average, we pay doctors about four times more than nurses and 11 times more than construction workers. Doctors represent the top end of professional work, nurses the middle range and construction workers represent the low wage. In other developed countries, the disparity is far smaller. Doctors and lawyers were paid slightly better in Singapore than the average elsewhere but the startling fact was how badly we paid the low wage workers. In Germany and Australia, a construction worker is paid HALF that of the average doctor! Hong Kong, a small and open economy like ours, paid nurses a third that of doctors. Construction workers earned a quarter that of doctors!

Ho called it the incomplete wage revolution. It began in the 1980s as we reformed the export-oriented industries. Factories that relied on low wage workers shifted out. We had to move up the value-added chain with higher wages. Today, we have high value-added export and services industries that pay decent wages. The trouble was with our domestic industries. There are some industries that cannot be shifted out – we will need to have cleaners, gardeners, security guards, construction workers and retail assistants in Singapore. Instead of also increasing wages gradually and allowing companies to figure how to make workers progressively more productive, we had large-scale import of low wage migrant workers. The situation started to explode in the 1990s where we grew from 311,000 migrant workers in 1990 to over 1.42 million by 2019, the vast majority of whom are low wage. Foreign workers account for 38% of our workforce today, stretching the limits which a small country like Singapore can take.

The large influx of migrant workers over such a sustained period depressed the wages of local low skilled workers who had remained in the domestic industries. Employers continued to fill with migrant workers as the demand went up. Levies started increasing when the government wanted to force companies to hire locals and be less reliant on foreigners. I believe many of the measures were done too late. We were already having many low wage migrant workers willing to work for very little. The better and more experienced migrant workers can find better paying jobs in other countries. The higher levies and accommodation costs made businesses look for cheaper workers, never mind that their skill levels are not there and that they do not speak much English.

In two of my earlier blog posts, I recounted this 3-decade journey of large influx of migrant workers and some solutions we can look at using the construction sector as an example.

Today, Singapore face a rapidly changing world with lots of technology disruptions and with our neighbours also hungry for success. We are now presented with the disruptions due to the pandemic. We have China and USA on hostile relationship that is impacting world trade. These are all known facts. Even before the pandemic started, we were already seeing higher retrenchments amongst PMETs and challenging operating environment for our companies. There is mismatch between training and employment opportunities. With the pandemic, more jobs will be lost. More companies will close down.

We can use this current period of job stresses to transform certain domestic industries. It will take big government interventions but we can make certain jobs more viable for Singaporeans, to progressively pay better for technical skills like in other developed economies, and to gradually move the industry up the productivity path. We should seriously state our intent by setting Minimum Wages. We want to match the Swiss standard of living but our model for growth had so far been that of Dubai’s and not Switzerland’s.

(2) I am concerned as to our strategy on low wage migrant workers. This is an old issue, raised by experts from time to time. Even our founding leaders such as the late Dr Goh Keng Swee and the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew had warned about becoming over-reliant on migrant workers or having too many of them. We have blown past all the numbers they had warned about. In the 2013 Population White Paper debate, we were told to accept 1-2% increase in migrant workers each year or face economic decline. The numbers continue to rise after that debate. We could reach 6.9 million population in 10 years’ time and far more after that. This would result in a society with much higher income and wealth inequality, higher pandemic risks, as well as probably much higher xenophobia, social divisions, overcrowding, less social well-being and less social capital and national solidarity. 

Beyond providing better accommodation, we need to look at how to bring in more productive foreign workers so that we can have a better starting base and can pay them better. I am not an expert. I suspect there are lots of low hanging fruits we can pluck by first recruiting better. Currently, the middleman makes big bucks bringing able-bodied workers in from low wage countries willing to pay the huge fees to come to Singapore. Many may not have relevant skills. Many come saddled with debts, desperately afraid of being sent back home.

Singapore has done some small scale setting up of ITE-type of training in neighbouring countries on government to government relationship. I think if we can look at places where we recruit large number of migrant workers. We can put our vocational training expertise to good use. If we can have more productive workers already trained at source; familiar with the tools, processes and automation needed in Singapore, I believe we can jump start productivity. Having such institutions at source can also offer better transparency and links for recruitment. The implementation may need more thoughts and strong government backing to be workable. I think this can uplift productivity and wages at the low end, and allow us to do with fewer numbers of workers. And I believe that if we can build up a strong pipeline of skilled overseas workers, coupled with aggressive investment in better construction processes and automation, we might even be able to create globally competitive Singapore construction companies.

The welfare of workers can also be better taken care of. We can think of careers for them to move upwards while in Singapore. A few months ago, I came across a former foreign domestic worker who did part time studies in early childhood when in Singapore (she had a very supporter employer), and is now a trained preschool teacher here after finishing her domestic helper contract. Such stories are few and far in between. Most come, work hard with outdated and low productivity methods and return home with some savings to do other things. I believe few low wage migrant workers make it up the career ladder in Singapore. Many years ago, Singapore thrived because we provided opportunities for our low wage migrant workers. The innovative and hardworking ones climbed in their career and even start businesses in Singapore. Many of our big local institutions had started that way.

(3) We need to free up the Singapore spirit. We are victim of our past successes – we have grown risk averse. We celebrate innovation only when it meets the government’s agenda but clamp down on alternative views. I wrote about this last month – Monopoly of wisdom will cripple Singapore. I cited Sonny Liew as an example.

Be open. Be free spirited. Be bold. Our past leaders were so. PM Lee’s speech yesterday recounted how Singapore had overcome. Yes, we did. We overcame the lack of an armed forces with a modern force built on national service and modernisation. We overcame housing problem by being socialist – mass land acquisition from the rich and building HDB flats for as many Singaporeans as possible. We cleaned up the Singapore river, and more. Sure, we can do it again. There was boldness in the early leaders. There were no past successes to safeguard, only a future to aim towards. Bold ideas had to be tried.

These days, I noticed that many have become afraid to take risk. There are tried and tested ways to succeed. Just follow rules. Leaders in the government service or political office bearers are rotated frequently. We become wary of projects that may take years to see results or that cut across ministries or are seen as ‘risky’. We become afraid to let smaller start-ups have a go at projects in case we have to answer if projects fail. We award at higher costs to companies with big names so that if they fail, it will not be the fault of the evaluation team.

If we are to build world leading companies, to pioneer big brands that can fly the Singapore flag all over the world, we need to free up our spirit, not mute it. Our reforms cannot start only when Singaporeans enter the workforce. It must start from school. In education, we are again victims of our past successes. Our schools were earlier reformed to make the education processes more efficient to train up workers for incoming investments and to fill up jobs. We thought we had figured out the formula for sorting out students by abilities and then fast track them along career paths. We cannot rely on model answers, for the new world economy may not conform to known models. We need to celebrate ambiguity in education. We need students to be bold to ask questions. We need them to create.

(4) I believe Singaporeans are resilient. In recent years, with the growing mismatch between jobs and training, more have switched to the gig economy. Food delivery and private hire driving are not easy work. Yet PMET Singaporeans, many retrenched or in low paying jobs, turned to these trades to find a way to make a living. We will need to reclaim PMET jobs for Singaporeans and to work out viable career paths for Singaporeans in domestic industries, many of which are too low-paying to sustain the high costs of living in Singapore.

Being more resilient also means better preparedness in food and other supplies. Yes, it is great that we have Polish eggs and Arabian shrimps. MTI is doing right by seeking new sources of food and essential supplies. I think it would be just as great if Temasek takes the lead to invest aggressively so that we own critical food sources overseas. Sure, we might still be hit with supply restrictions such as what had happened over masks in Taiwan recently. To overcome our smallness in size, we may need to expand more aggressively into ownership of critical resources outside of Singapore.

Let’s look forward to a more resilient, more creative, more productive and more egalitarian Singapore post Covid-19.

Note: The views are that of the author. I had an earlier discussion with Ku Swee Yong where we found that we share similar ideas about having some ITE-type institutions in countries with large number of migrant workers bound for Singapore.

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Unpaid school fees – What are the teachable moments?

Here are thoughts on the issue of the student not getting the original PSLE results over unpaid fees, which has gone viral online and MOE has officially responded.

The incident reminded me of a case I took when helping at a Meet-People-Session in Aljunied GRC a few years back.

It was almost 9.30 pm then, which was the closing time for residents to register to meet the MP over issues. I had just completed a case and I was about to leave as there were no further cases needing a case writer. Then, a young lady rushed to the counter and registered. I popped over to check and decided to take her case. It turned out that she was a 2nd year diploma student at a government supported non-profit college. She had unpaid fees and was told by the college that unless she paid up, she would not get her official results and she needed the results to register for her courses for the third and final year. She was very distressed because the last date to register for her courses was like that next day or very soon after that. She was sobbing as she told her story. She is the eldest with only her uneducated mum working part time to support the family. The family was constantly in debt, borrowing from relatives. Her previous year fees had been paid by an aunt who was not able to give her another loan so soon. She worked part time but that was only enough for her own living expenses and not for her fees. She believed she would be kicked out of college because of her unpaid fees. She did not even know what her 2nd year results were because the school’s policy was that they could not release the results without payment of fees.

I happened to have a friend working in the school. I called him. He was kind enough to set up a rushed meeting the next morning with the finance manager. I called the young lady to come along. The school did not know of her financial situation. The finance manager was very kind and revealed that she had passed and may register for the third year courses and asked her to apply for a bursary. The school also gave her time to pay up for the previous fees, which she eventually borrowed from her relatives. She got a bursary for her final year of studies. As she had the relevant skills, I engaged her on a part-time basis for my art company that year as well.

She graduated, found a job in a MNC as a web designer and I last heard she was still working there. Hers is a happy story that could have turned out badly. I asked why she did not try to apply for any financial assistance before then. She said she was not aware (even though the school had schemes and were indeed kind and fast to act when her situation surfaced). It is hard to blame her as she was not yet an adult then and the family already had so much problems. Relatives were afraid of them requesting for more financial assistance. She only came to the MPS because she shared her problems at a church meeting and her friend suggested going to meet her MP, which she promptly rushed to because the MPS happened to be that evening.

Back to the MOE case. Like MOE, the college the lady was in had to have some policies over unpaid fees. So I do not fault these organisations for needing to have rules to go by. MOE said it is a teachable moment for the parents. The problem often is that when there are persistent unpaid fees, there are often some deep issues or dysfunctional family situations. I am not sure if the family would be in a good situation to talk to the child about the learning points of having to pay their dues if they had many other daily stresses or were dysfunctional. I do not know the exact situation for the PSLE student as to why financial assistance was not applied for. I know schools have lots of ways to help low income family pay for fees and even get pocket money allowances because I have been involved in helping to raise such funds for schools. The young lady I had helped could have raised her problems to the school much earlier and she would likely have gotten a bursary from day 1 but she said she was not aware of support schemes and did not know that she would have qualified.

I will end with another story. A principal of a faith-based kindergarten told me recently that she and the form teacher of a class made a surprise visit to a family whose child had not paid the third term fees nor fees for the school bus. The boy had stopped attending school without a formal withdrawal. The bus had refused to pick him as well. The purpose of the visit was to understand what happened and to try to get the child to be back so he can finished his final few weeks of preschool with friends he has made over the past couple of years before going on to primary school.

They reached the home of the family just as the father and son were stepping out. The father was apologetic and promised to pay up the fees. He thought that the school had come to chase for the debts. The school explained that they were not there for the fees as they had already asked the Board for permission to waive off the fees. They just wanted to ask the child to go back to school as they did not want him to miss out the memorable final weeks. They even asked the bus company if they could sponsor the bus trips for the final period for the family.

What are the teachable moments? It can be to tell the family and child that they need to pay for all financial obligations. It can also be to tell them that there’s grace in the society if there are truly situations that call for it. I hope the young preschool boy will grow up well and one day remember that the school he attended reached out because they did not want him to fall behind no matter what the family circumstances were; that if he is financially capable one day, he can pay it back to others.

I do not think many families like to owe money especially over education. It is embarrassing to the child. With persistent unpaid fees, there are often stories behind these which can only be known if we probe further. Probing needs time. I do not know enough of the situation with the PSLE student as to how the school may have previously reached out to the family. Teachers and principals are often stressed out because our schools run large operations and class sizes are big. There are daily fires to fight when school is operational. Digging into problems such as persistent unpaid fees and trying to resolve them require lots of time and patience. As much as there are teachable moments to the families, there are also engagement opportunities by the schools and by social welfare organisations to use these as trigger points to dig further and to help families work a way out of problems.

#Correction: The earlier post stated the Principal and Vice Principal of the faith-based kindergarten. It should be Principal and form teacher of the class the boy was in.

A Balancing Act – dissecting the issue on foreign scholars and tuition grants

Two days ago in parliament in response to my WP colleague NCMP Leon Perera, Education Minister Ong Ye Kung revealed that government spending on scholarships and tuition grants for foreign students fell 50% over the past 10 years. It is now around $238 million, which means the annual spending around 2009 would have been $476 million. Put this in the context of Singapore having only 3(#) government funded universities then (versus 6 now), the percentage spent by the government then to support foreign students versus how much it spent on supporting local students would have been very much higher than today.

When I entered parliament in 2011, this was one of the issues I dug into immediately. I had met many Singaporeans whose children were not able to enter our local universities because of the limited number of places. Many went into private universities here or abroad. I had filed a question in parliament in 2011 to first gather some facts.  There were then 41,000 Singaporeans enrolled in private universities and private education institutions (PEIs). This number did not include Singaporeans studying in universities abroad because the government did not track the data. Add this group of overseas Singapore students in and the number of Singaporeans seeking private tertiary education would be even higher.

In any case, 41,000 was a very high figure considering our yearly cohort of Singaporeans of university-going age by birth was then around 45,000-50,000 . It showed the aspiration for higher learning was very big but places were very limited. The cost for private education, whether done here or abroad is steep and beyond the means of many ordinary Singaporeans. It was only later that the government decided to expand the number of places for local students and supported an additional two more universities – UniSIM (now SUSS) and the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT).

My friends teaching in our local universities had told me that they were alarmed at the then-increasingly large number of foreign students on our government scholarships who could barely even get third class honours. The cost of each foreign scholarship is high, and if we have to spend money on non-Singaporeans, then it should be on those who can really add significant quality to our education standards and to our economy.

Data was scant, so I began a series of probe into this issue. I asked in February 2012 about the number of foreign scholars in Singapore and the amount spent on them, only to be told that the government gave out 320 scholarships to ASEAN students yearly. I followed up again the next month with another questions about non-ASEAN scholars and was given a figure of 1,700 scholars a year. That meant 2,000+ foreign scholarships a year, multiplied by their disclosed rate of $18,000 spent annually on average per scholar. What MOE did not disclose was that scholarships given out would be valid for the duration of the studies here as long as the scholar continued to meet MOE’s criteria, which would typically be 4 years. The cost of foreign scholarships given out annually would have worked out to be at least $144 million a year then.

Next was whether we were giving scholarships to foreigners that are of good quality enough to add to the vibrancy of our education system. From further parliamentary questions, I found out that a third of foreigners on our undergraduate scholarships did not graduate with at least a second upper honours, the typical definition of a good honours. MOE later disclosed that these scholars were only expected to maintain the GPA equivalent of second lower honours to continue to be retained on their scholarship programme, a low benchmark indeed for a fully funded foreign scholar. On various occasions, I called for this benchmark to be set higher to at least at the GPA equivalent for a good honours but that was rejected by MOE. I am not sure if the benchmark has since been changed by MOE or such low expectations still exist.

My motivations for raising those issues were not because I am anti-foreigners. I have foreigner friends who have studied here on our government scholarships. Some have become Singapore citizens or PR and settled down to have children here. My concern was that we were giving out foreign scholarships too liberally with too low expectations. Yes, other foreign universities do give out scholarships to Singaporeans but for Singaporeans to qualify on those same generous terms given by MOE, surely they are expected to do better than second lower honours. We take pride that our most established universities, NUS and NTU now rank in the top globally with the USA Ivy league universities and UK’s Oxford and Cambridge. Surely when these elite universities give scholarships to Singaporeans, they expect much higher of us.

I was also concerned about the high amount spent with weak efforts to enforce their fulfillment of bonds, whether for scholars or for tuition grant holders. The figure revealed by Minister Ong is that 4% of tuition grant awardees are in default currently. I believe the figure was higher earlier until MOE decided to step up enforcement.

In any case, $476 million spent annually ten years ago was definitely far too high. Post GE2011, the government had realised the flaws in their earlier policies on foreign students and started the reversal. Singaporeans had spoken loudly enough to be heard. In the earlier rush to boost foreign student numbers, some secondary schools with boarding facilities were asked to ram up their hostel places. There are some deserted hostel blocks today in these schools, legacy of this failed policy. We may have cut the spending down to $238 million now but I think more details are needed as to what criteria we use for awarding scholarships and whether we expect scholars to remain in Singapore to contribute to us economically. Pre-tertiary students are not bonded and about half of them do not end up continuing their tertiary education in Singapore. They do not need to return to Singapore to work as well when they graduate.

Having foreign students can be good. The question is how generous we need to be, what criteria we set especially when we give out scholarships and how we enforce recipients to fulfill their bond obligations.

#Correction: My original post stated 4. SUTD started exactly in 2009. There were only NUS, NTU and SMU 10 or more years ago.

 

Think big, start small, act fast – here’s something for the Minister to consider

The speech by the Minister for Education, Mr Ong Ye Kung on the annual promotion exercise for the administrative service caught my attention.

Mr Ong was encouraging the public servants to offer bold policy suggestions, rather than “second-guess the policy preferences” of ministers. Amongst other things, he also had said that sound policies must take into account ground realities and constraints, and also that “there is no perfect comprehensive grant plan. If we over-plan, we run the risk of paralysis by analysis.”

I totally agree and so I wish to offer again a suggestion that I had mooted for many years already, both in and out of parliament. In his speech, Mr Ong had covered various initiatives in the domain of other ministries. I wish to suggest one that is for the ministry that Mr Ong is in charge of.

I had called for pilot through-train schools from primary 1 to secondary 4, extending to college even if necessary. We have often talked about our stressful education system; how our children are subjected to pressurising various high stake examinations early in life. Many have talked about our our students being exam-smart but lacking in creativity and imagination. Much hope was offered during the national Singapore Conversation exercise and when the Prime Minister said in his National Day speech that the PSLE will be changed. The changes though, after much anticipation, will not make any significant impact towards reduce the stress.

The suggestions for the through-train school that I had made can be found in the selected links below, so I will not elaborate in this blog.

a.  Committee of Supply debate on MOE, Mar 2012

b. Scrapping the PSLE, blog post, Sep 2012

c. Committee of Supply debate on MOE, Mar 2014

d. WP proposes small start for through-train plan, CNA 5 Sep 2015

e. Singaporeans need a bolder look at how to change education system, Feb 2017

Being involved actively in the K-12 education sector for over two decades, I do understand the challenges faced if we are to change the current education system too quickly. Having gotten so used to a competitive system with high stake examinations, constant streaming and highly differentiated schools, it will be hard to immediately switch to an alternative. I too understand that as then-Minister for Education, Mr Heng Swee Kiat said in 2012 in response to my proposal for such a through-train scheme, that pressure may be shifted to primary one. Hence, my suggestion was to avoid involving top schools for such pilot schools, and to also start small with a limited number of such through-train schools.

Attitudes need time to change. Right now, there is no alternative for parents who do not wish that their children be caught in this rat-race of constant high-stake streaming. There have been many good policy initiatives in the past, such as Thinking Schools Learning Nation, Teach Less Learn More, Every School a Good School, etc. Set against the overarching policy of having to differentiate schools by resources and students achievements, as well as high stake examinations to sort students into schools and academic stream, these good policies end up being sidelined. Tuition continues to flourish.

Having just a few pilot through-train schools, preferably neighbourhood schools or schools with existing strong primary-secondary affiliations (again, I emphasise excluding top schools and schools already on 6-year IP), will allow parents who believe in 10 years of holistic education to commit their children to the same school. Over time, perhaps we will have a chance to shift Singaporean mindsets to accept that we can develop successful students without competitively sorting students through high-stake examinations, and even allow students of mixed abilities to learn effectively together in the same class.

It is a big dream, but we can start small, and perhaps act faster too. Meanwhile, other messages that MOE sends must be consistent with what the minister is saying too. For example, two years ago, MOE totally took away the autonomy of principals to allow appeal by students into secondary schools and junior colleges, even if they had missed the cut-off by just one point for whatever reasons. It basically promotes a top-down approach to getting things done, which quite contradicts what we now often hear that there should be more autonomy and initiatives from bottom up.

Sending the right signals

We have often heard, “Do what I say, but don’t do as I do.”

Sometimes the messaging can be quite subtle. Those in leadership positions may not realise it if we are not sensitive enough. The recent viral publicity over flyers by a Residents’ Committee touting the benefits of serving as grassroots volunteers such as car parking privileges and priority registration in primary schools for their children, comes to my mind. (http://www.straitstimes.com/politics/flyer-listing-benefits-for-grassroots-volunteers-draws-response-from-wp)

The issue of priority registration for primary 1 for community leaders is something that I had been concerned about, and had raised in parliament several times. In 2012, then-Education Minister Heng Swee Keat had a written reply for my question on this privilege for grassroots leaders. He said that an average of 330 children were admitted yearly under the active community leaders scheme, just less than 1% of the primary 1 cohort (we have around 30,000 babies born each year). They only need to have served for one year as a community leader.

In 2013, I joined in the debate on this issue with a supplementary question for then-Senior Minister of State for Education (SMS), Ms Indranee Rajah. I had asked if the Ministry has done any survey to see how many community leaders have actively contributed to the schools that their children are enrolled in, and ‘if it can be a criterion for community leaders to have first made specific contributions to the schools before they are being considered for priority’. The reply was that the SMS was not aware of any such survey and that the criterion is based on contribution to the community, as opposed to contributions specifically to the school. In other words, the community leaders need not contribute any time or service to the school the child is enrolled into under priority registration. This is strictly a reward for ‘contribution to the community’.

During Committee of Supply debate in 2013, I had also spoken on the topic as I asked for a general review of the Primary 1 admission system. Specifically on the issue of community leaders, I had said “I feel community leaders need not be given priority. Being a community leader for the purpose of getting into top primary schools does not gel with the spirit of community service.”

I felt so because they do not necessarily add value to the primary school, unless they are also actively helping in the school in their position as a community leader. It becomes very transactional; the priority is a reward for the community leader, and a backdoor to get an edge to enter desired primary schools.

MOE has been touting that “Every School is a Good School” for several years already. So every school should be good enough for the community leaders’ children. Yet allowing for such privileges sends exactly the wrong signal, even if in a subtle way. That’s the same way ordinary folks will feel when a leader says that every school is a good school but they see that the leader’s own children are in preferred schools.

I agree with Former Nominated MP Calvin Cheng, who as reported in the Straits Time article of this Flyers episode, had left a pointed comment on his Facebook saying: “‘Selfless dedication’ does not need to be rewarded by preferential access to primary schools. Just saying.”

I think it is time to do what we say.

 

 

 

Pathways to success

Last month, my daughter came home from her holiday work with a story. The cleaning/cooking aunty at the preschool centre told the teachers that she was angry at her son who was studying in a polytechnic. She said that instead of studying hard, he was working every day till late at night at some events company. She showed my daughter the recent Whatsapp messages she had with her son.

From those messages, my daughter gathered that Aunty’s son was working because he wanted to be financially independent, so he had taken up a part time job managing sound systems at events. Events are typically held at night and hence he had to work late. He had also explained that he was still able to cope with the demands of his polytechnic studies.

My daughter and another teacher told Aunty that it was good that her son was being independent and working hard, and was not loafing or partying around or addicted to computer games, as some young adults his age may be. My daughter had friends who were good with sound systems and explained to Aunty that people often had to pay to learn how to manage those expensive sound equipment. She told Aunty that her son was now even being paid to learn how to be a sound engineer – a good skill to have. My daughter too started doing part-time work actively since she was 14 years old, so I guess she could speak with some assurances for Aunty.

I think my daughter and the other teacher managed to convince Aunty. She said she would go home later that day and talk to her son.

The Aunty’s concern is typical of the average Singaporean parents. We have been conditioned that the pathway to success in life is to score in exams. When you are studying, do not waste time on other things, even if these are useful skills to have or can help one to develop their character. If you are a student, just study. In many parents’ minds, grades are what matters.

Recently, I had a long conversation with a former high-flying government servant turned entrepreneur in a developing country. We all shared our concerns of Singaporeans being exams-smart but lacking the ability to cope in the new economy requiring innovation, creativity, resilience and many skills that one cannot train through the books. When I mentioned about us consistently scoring tops in PISA assessments, he remarked that our education advantage like those measured through PISA often disappear in tertiary studies when one has to go beyond knowledge. My former civil servant friend also shared his concern about high-flyers taking very safe paths. We will end up doing very safe things to meet short term KPIs, and not do things that are necessary for essential disruptive changes.

Several years ago, policy makers have said Singapore will embark on many pathways to success, beyond measuring by exam grades. That is highly necessary but the implementation will continue to be challenging. Mindsets of parents like Aunty need to change. Mindsets of employers, especially those in the civil service will need to change. Policy makers must dare to make bold changes where needed.

This is the year-end results period. We had the PSLE results released several weeks ago. O and A levels results will be out soon. As it is every year, parents will scramble to enrol their children in what they consider as good schools. Some will be disappointed that their children did not get the grades necessary for the targeted top schools.

We will need more young people to be like Aunty’s son. Some part-time work or active involvement in community work outside of school is good. It trains up resilience and time management. We will need our people to be more than exams smart if our economy is to do well in this new global economic climate.

To seriously innovate or not, that is the difficult question

Two news related to education in the last 2 days caught my attention.

Recently appointed Acting Education Minister (Schools) Ng Chee Meng had in his first major speech outlining his vision for schools yesterday, said that schools must go beyond teaching students to be good at solving problems, but help them develop the instincts and ability to be value-creators. He called for schools to encourage students to “have the courage to try, fail, try again, fail again, and eventually succeed.” He had urged for students to be innovators for Singapore to succeed.

I agree that’s needed. There is nothing new in the statement though. Every Education Minister since RADM Teo Chee Hean had been calling for greater innovation in students. Google search with the name of every Education Minister since 1997 together with keywords “innovation”, and “students” and you will get many hits. Then-Education Minister Teo had said in 1998, “Innovation will be absolutely critical to the creation of wealth in the 21st century … To develop an innovative work force, we will need to start in school by training our students to be enterprising and creative thinkers. The education system in Singapore has thus far emphasized the acquisition of factual knowledge. We will need to shift our focus to creative thinking skills. Instead of just being followers, our young must be prepared to experiment, to make mistakes, to learn and to innovate, in order to be leaders in their own fields.”

Schools have indeed tried different ways to get students to be creative and innovative since this push in the late 1990s. I have seen quite a number of these myself first hand. The difficulty is in how to make it systematic and lasting, in the face of other more important KPIs that schools must achieve and which parents expect schools to achieve. Innovation is usually not one of the key things in the mind of parents for their children to get out of schools. They worry about how to make it through our tough national streaming examinations, getting into what they consider as “good” schools (which tend to differ from MOE’s wish for ‘every school to be a good school’), getting the grades to be good enough for scholarships, and so on.

Innovation (or variations of it) is already one of the several values in most Singapore schools today. Efforts are already there, for nearly two decades now, on and off. The trouble with innovation or creativity, is that it is difficult to quantify. It is messy to encourage. It is not objective. It is hard to put a score to it like how you can put a T-Score to students for their PSLE results. T-Scores are objective. Deciding what is innovation is often very subjective. Teachers, most of them who have come through our education system and our society’s way of thinking, will often find it hard to deal with this as a subject or something to do in the classroom.

There are also the society’s expectations. We want students to try, fail, try agin, many times over. How many parents can accept that? How many students can accept that? Should we expect them to accept that, when our system try to measure things objectively and put scores to different things to make sure we are objective? These measurements usually have important implications, like the secondary schools and academic streams students will go to. It might even affect qualification for scholarships and jobs later in life.

The second piece of news, seemingly unrelated to the first, but which I consider is relevant, is that of schools being told not to take in transfer pupils whose PSLE scores did not meet the schools’ cut-off point during this school transfer period.

Each year, right after the PSLE results are known, students choose their secondary schools. MOE will run the applications through a computerised system to assign schools to students, based on the PSLE T-Scores. After that, there is a couple of weeks where students can appeal to schools they did not get into, subject to vacancies and to the discretion of principals. If successful in the appeal, students get to start within the first few days of the new year in the school of their appeal choice. Usually, only a handful of appeals are successful per school anyway, because not that many would get to move out of a school to create the vacancies for others to come in. This year, the directive appeared to have put an end to this appeal process.

In a reply to the press, MOE said students are posted to schools based on “objective and transparent measures of academic merit” and appeals afterwards “should be aligned to these same principles, to be fair to the other students”.

It is often hard to argue against the principle of being objective and transparent. We do not like mess. Appeals are messy. Some parents will cry foul when they see someone of a lower T-Score getting into a school when their children could not.

Well, innovation is messy too. We want kids to try, fail and keep trying. Innovation sometimes involve trying unconventional ideas, often doing things differently. As a school system, however, we try to make things standard, measurable and objective.  Otherwise there will be many complaints to deal with. Such desire for objectivity does not stop just at the schools. Hence as a society, we end up being obsessed with academic results and awards, because these are measurable and objective. We end up with “extreme meritocracy“, where academic grades achieved early in life can determine a lot of the person’s success later in life.

Should we give back that autonomy to principals to decide on just a few places in this short transfer period, together with all the messiness it will bring? I think the implications may be beyond just the few places per school today.

Two years ago at NDR 2013, PM Lee Hsien Loong announced that the PSLE T-score, long a stress point for parents, will eventually be removed and replaced with bands similar to those used for O’ and A’ levels. We have yet to hear definitively how and when this implementation will take place. Without T-Score, it will become even more subjective on how to post students. If we attempt to once again be objective, T-Scores may still be kept for students but will not be known to them. When they apply for schools, the computer system can check the ‘hidden’ T-Scores and determine how to place students “objectively”.

Or we can leave it more open to principals to decide by looking at the grades achieved together with other holistic considerations. We will end up with students with say three A* (or even two A*) making it into a top school while other with four A* may not. I can already hear some readers crying foul over this.

If we are to expect principals to make such decisions in a few years, assuming we get to eventually carry out PSLE without T-Scores, will they be ready to make such decisions if they cannot have the autonomy to decide on a few post-PSLE results transfer places from now onwards?

There is a dilemma, whether we like to acknowledge it or now. Can we accept a messier and hopefully more creative and innovative society, or are we such strong believers in measurements and objectivity? Acting Minister Ng cited the example of Steve Jobs enrolling in a calligraphy course when he was young and that helped him later in life with Apple’s distinctive typography. Well, Steve Jobs had quit college because he questioned if the degree would not be helpful to his life. He however, continued to stay on in the same college to take random courses, including the course on calligraphy . How many parents will accept that for their children in Singapore?

Acting Minister Ng also threw down the gauntlet for nay-sayers to be proven wrong that our education system and teachers are conservative and risk-averse. As a policy, are we prepared to be more risk taking? The latest announcement to disallow principals the autonomy for appeals does not seem to suggest so.

I think we can even go beyond allowing these sort of autonomy in school places and changing from T-Scores to subject banding, depending on how big our appetite for moving away from conservatism is. I had for many years, called to start pilot schools that allow through-train from primary to secondary, with ‘O’ levels as the first major examinations for these students. I had already put out various ways this can be done in a gradual manner more acceptable to society, so I shall not elaborate in this post. Here’s just a funnier recent report of that proposal from Mothership. I think gradually moving away from early high-stakes examinations can contribute to an environment where innovation can be allowed to flourish.

To seriously innovate or not, that is the difficult question.

 

 

 

 

Yee JJ’s Rally Speech – 4 Sep 2015

各位义顺的居民，亲爱的马林百列集选区选民，来自新加坡各个角落的工人党支持者，晚上好！感谢你们今天成千上万地来到这里，来表示对我们的支持。

4年半前，我与工人党展开了这段旅程。虽然我当时是新晋的候选人，选民们还是给了我非常强烈的支持。

我成为了非选国会区议员。我在4年的任期中在国会里提出了许多方面的课题，其中就包括了教育、商业、人力、环境、幼儿教育、经济等等。我和我的同事在国会上提出课题时一直都按照着工人党 理性、负责任 和 互相尊重 的信念。我们会继续这么做，因为我们都热爱新加坡。

我为什么会在2011年加入工人党？因为当时我觉得，一党独大是不健康的，人民应该可以选择另外一个有实力的团队。 我相信新加坡人非常有才华。行动党低估了我们。我们的国家有足够的空间支持多个优秀的团队。 在制定政策有的时候，国会中有更多不同的声音是好的， 是有益的!

在那以后，我很高兴，看到更多的人加入了工人党。马林百列集选区的团队除了我之外，虽然都是新面孔，但是，他们都非常努力地在我们的基层组织活动里服务选民，也帮忙为政策进行资料搜集和研究。 我们的团队年轻、有活力,也热心地帮助居民。这是新加坡走向SG100必须经历的更新的故事。

9月11号，请投工人党一票。掌握民权，把握未来!

Dear Singaporeans, thank you for being here tonight. In my house visits these 2 days, I have met so many residents that have come from far away to attend our rallies. Your support has given us strength to press on in our campaign.

Today is Teachers’ Day. A happy Teachers’ Day to all educators out there!

Being Teachers’ Day, I want to share a quote:

“The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate ‘apparently ordinary’ people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.”  -K. Patricia Cross, Education Scholar

This quote stands out for me because this is what I believe is important in education – making winners out of ordinary people, making winners out of Singaporeans. For too long, our system sorted students through various major exams, trying to pick winners. We had ranked and branded schools and made parents so anxious. They are afraid that their children will lose out if they miss on a desired choice by just one point on the PSLE T-Score.

In my 4 years in parliament, I have raised many issues, the most is in education. I have asked for putting school-based student care facilities in all schools, even before MOE started increasing the number of such places.

I have raised issues on the number of foreign scholarships given out and found that many of these scholars had graduated with second lower honours or with poorer results. Just 2 months ago, in response to my parliamentary question, MOE revealed that their expectations for a foreign scholar is still a second lower honours because that is the Grade Point Average which they are expected to maintain throughout their studies. We have some 3,600 – 4,000 foreign scholars at any time in our local universities, at a cost of $25,000 per scholar per year. We spend up to $100 million each year just on undergraduate scholarships for foreigners. Yet we expect these scholars to graduate with just second lower only? We should set our expectations much higher when funding foreign scholars, especially when our universities now rank amongst the top 4 in Asian and around the top 20 in the world. Instead, let us invest more in our own people to make them into winners!

One proposal you have heard from some of our candidates in the past 2 days is a 10-year Through Train School. I like to emphasize that we have proposed this as an option, starting with just 2 schools in each zone, or a total of 8 schools across Singapore. In parliament, I had also suggested that we exclude top schools from this pilot so we do not have the pressure being passed down to primary 1 admission. Only parents who truly believe in the education provided by these pilot schools should subscribe to this.

After several decades of high pressure system, sorting at PSLE and ranking and branding of schools, even MOE has trouble trying to implement what PM Lee has promised in his 2013’s National Day Rally, which is to move PSLE away from T-score into banding by grades. 2 years after this announcement, no details have been released. It seems this issue will be passed on to perhaps the next Education Minister.

Having such pilot 10-year Through Train schools is one way for parents to see how such a system would work, starting with neighbourhood schools. When parents see that it is possible for their children to go through such schools and still do well in life, we can start to talk about making more structural changes to our education system, with the aim of educating our children to make winners out of them.

The Workers’ Party believes in empowering our people, to make them into winners. Come September 11, vote Workers’ Party. Empower your future!