SINGAPORE (Mar 11): By his own admission, Education Minister Ong Ye Kung would have benefitted from the changes to the secondary education system that he announced in Parliament on March 5. He came from a Chinese-speaking family, entered primary school unable to read or write English and had to work hard to catch up. It would have been better for him to have been placed in a “less demanding band for English, which would give me time to pick up the basics, and then upgrade to a more demanding band if I could meet the standard”, he says.

The Ministry of Education (MOE) is removing streaming for secondary school by 2024. In five years, students entering Secondary One will no longer be labelled as “Normal” or “Express” and their abilities will not be termed “academic” or “technical”. Instead, they will be able to take subjects at the level of difficulty suited to them — a level of individual customisation new to the Singapore education system.

Instead of parking students into streams that strictly define what subjects they take and the depth at which those subjects is studied, the new system allows students to take each subject at a level suited to their needs and abilities. If one was stronger in Math, Literature and English, but less so at Chemistry, he could take Math, Literature and English at the G3 level and Chemistry at G1 or G2.

G stands for “general” and G1 will roughly correspond to Normal (Technical) standard, G2 to Normal (Academic) and G3 to Express. Graduating certificates will be streamlined from O Level, Normal (Academic) or Normal (Technical) certificates to a common certificate co-branded by Singapore and Cambridge.

The existing streaming exercise, introduced in 1981, drafts students into Express, Normal (Academic) or Normal (Technical) “streams”, based on their Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) scores. The measure was introduced to reduce the school attrition rate. Students who could not catch up were dropping out, and the introduction of less-taxing streams saw dropout rates fall from a third of each cohort in the 1970s to less than 1% today. Streaming allowed for education to be customised to the learning rates of students, Ong says.

But over time, the exercise grew to identify some students as being of lower capabilities, stigmatising them and giving them the mindset of being “only a Normal stream student”. Another downside to streaming, says the minister, is that there is margin for error, especially when it is done at a young age. Also, “streaming assumes that students need a certain pace of learning in all their subjects, whereas many students, in fact, have uneven strengths across different subjects”.

“We have been grappling with this trade-off — between customisation in education and the downside of stigmatisation,” Ong says.

He adds that this change is to cater to the uneven strengths and weaknesses of students. “Put to rest the mistaken notion that there is a single, dominant path to success that starts from a very young age. The school system will become far more flexible than today, so that we can customise learning to the student, to give them time to blossom at different points in their lives, while anchoring the belief that we can grow and get better,” he says.

In fact, this customisation seems to have borne results, according to a pilot started in 2014. The MOE had placed lower secondary students in 12 schools into bands for English, Mother Tongue, Math and Science. Half of the Normal (Academic) students in those schools took up subjects at the Express level. They have since sat for their national examinations with results that Ong says are encouraging.

A quarter of the Normal stream students who took O-Level English got A1 or A2, compared with 24% of the Express students. For Math, that was 26% compared with 50%; for Combined Science, it was 33% compared with 34%.

The House gave the changes a resounding approval. Some Members of Parliament (MPs) have been calling for the streaming system to be reviewed. Before Ong’s announcement, MP for Jalan Besar, Denise Phua, who also chairs the Government Parliamentary Committee for Education, had on March 4 called streaming a “sacred cow” and said it had negative effects on students. MP for Jurong, Ang Wei Neng, recounted, from his experience as a science teacher, how students felt “defeated” by labels.

The changes are also welcomed by experts, who agree that the move reduces labelling and stigmatisation and can help students excel at what they are good at. Timothy Chan, director of SIM Global Education’s academic division, says, “There is more flexibility for students. So, a student who is weak in a certain area can still excel because of passion or capability in another area.”

National University of Singapore (NUS) economist Kelvin Seah thinks the change can even positively affect a person’s future earnings and employability because getting into the Normal stream can affect his subsequent labour market outcomes. “The abolishing of the three separate tracks allows for more permeability and somewhat lessens the repercussions of performing poorly in the PSLE,” he says.

There is also hope that having students take different subjects at various levels will increase social mixing. “There is now a genuine belief that the social environment of the school can positively influence a student’s academic behaviour and performance,” says Ong. The minister cited the example of how some schools have put students into classes based on their co-curricular activities or to have in each class students from three streams. Late-coming and absenteeism rates fell in the former, and students were happy and helping each other out in the latter.

NUS sociologist Tan Ern Ser, who co-authored a 2017 report that found low mixing between Singaporeans of different social classes, thinks there will be greater diversity in practice. He says, “In the worst-case scenario, [if] those from a ­higher-class background are found only in G3 and, conversely, [if] those from a ­lower-class background are found only in G1, then there would be minimal opportunity for social mixing in the context of classrooms. However, I reckon there will be greater diversity in practice [with the new system]. With diversity, there will be greater opportunity for students of different backgrounds to learn together, collaborate on projects and interact with one another.”

Despite the progress, there are still “sacred cows” in the education system. For one, the homogeneity in elite schools — which only take in top-performing students — is unlikely to change. Those schools, where students typically do well in every subject, are unlikely to have to offer any subject at G1 or G2 levels, unless they take in students from a broader range of backgrounds or abilities.

Meanwhile, there are concerns the changes could have the opposite effect and instead lead to more unintentional segregation. Seah says some parents may not react to such social mixing favourably, believing it could have adverse effects on their children. “The policy might induce parents, especially those of decent academic performers, to seek out admissions into Integrated Programme schools and schools that cater only to G3 students more intensively, so that their children will be able to avoid mixing with peers that take some of the subjects taught at the G1 or G2 levels.”

This was something one of the schools cited by Ong faced. At Edgefield Secondary, where each class had students of mixed abilities, some parents said they would have enrolled their children in another school if they had known about the practice. Ong says while he understands their concerns, Edgefield was making the right trade-off to develop students academically and socially, “reshaping our existing culture for the better”.

NUS’s Tan encourages parents to take the new system “in the right spirit”. “If they find new ways of differentiating their children’s academic performance from others, or try to pressure their children into moving to a higher subject level, we may be taking a step backward,” he cautions. “They should want their children turning out highly motivated, eager to learn — not stressed out and jaded — and thereby maximising their potential.”

There are still questions about implementation, timetables for classes and what the post-secondary posting system will be like, given the new certification and bandings. Ong says 2024 is still a few years away; schools will learn and adapt and the ministry will review the posting considerations.

The minister adds that the current announcement builds on previous work such as the banding pilot and the merging of primary school streams. The “significant changes” were implemented despite Singapore’s high standing globally when it comes to education standards. “In our current position, it is easy to feel complacent and tell ourselves that we only need to tweak at the edges, but that would be a mistake,” Ong says. “We must keep evolving and adapting to ensure the system is fit for the future and, when necessary, take bold steps.”

<strong>Recent changes to the education system:</strong>

• 2012 — MOE says it will stop announcing PSLE top scorers and stop sorting secondary schools into bands

• July 2016 — PSLE aggregate scores to be replaced by wider bands by 2021

• September 2018 — MOE announces changes to assessments and exams for primary and secondary students to shift focus from tests towards a joy for learning

• March 2019 — Streaming in secondary schools to be scrapped by 2024

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