Dr Ng Eng Hen, Acting Minister for Manpower and Minister of State for Education 

Mr Chan Soo Sen, Minister of State for Education and Community Development & Sports 

Mr Hawazi Daipi, Parliamentary Secretary 

General Lim Chuan Poh, Second Permanent Secretary 

Mr Wee Heng Tin, Director-General of Education 

Colleagues

We have a strong and robust education system. It is a system well recognized for the high levels of achievement of our students, in all the courses we offer. Our students aim high, and do well by most international comparisons.

In recent years we have begun repositioning our education system to help our young meet the challenges of a more competitive and rapidly changing future. We have devolved more authority and responsibility to schools and school clusters to encourage local initiative. We have trimmed the curriculum and refined our assessment systems to allow more scope to develop thinking and other process skills. We have strengthened citizenship and values education. We have made major enhancements to the teaching service through EduPac. And we have renewed and enhanced more of our school facilities, and provided an infrastructure that is without parallel internationally to enable greater use of IT in teaching and learning in every school.

We have also added to the strength and diversity of the post-secondary sector. We established the Singapore Management University (SMU) in 2000 to focus on servicing the business and finance sectors, launched our fifth polytechnic this year, and are now restructuring ITE into three regional campuses.

The strength and dynamism of the Singapore education system is precisely what allows us to look ahead, grasp the fundamental changes that are occurring in the environment in which we operate, take in views from our stakeholders - industry, parents and students, and the community - and make further improvements to ensure that our young can enter the future with confidence, and that Singapore thrives.

Our education system is not in need of overhaul. But we have to keep looking for ways we can improve, and stay relevant in a fast shifting world. We should avoid hubris at all cost, in education as with everything else we do in Singapore. We must always be open to new ideas and approaches, and never box ourselves in with past assumptions or ways of doing things. No assumption is beyond scrutiny and reexamination. We may put the stone back in place after turning it over - which we will do if the reasons for the stone being there are still sound - but we may have to pick it up again for a close look from time to time.

We should implement changes carefully and thoughtfully, and avoid being captured by fads. We are not in the business of being fashionable. But we should be willing to learn from other systems and try out new approaches - such as new ways of running a school, or organizing classes, or opening up new choices to students - where they can add real value and diversity in education. We should also not be intimidated by the fact that we are a large organization, and that change in large organizations is more difficult and more risky. We must be willing to experiment, sometimes by letting some schools go ahead and do something different. Let some birds fly faster or higher, or just fly differently, even if they break the usual formation, while the rest of the flock watches and decides if they should join in and do something different too. This mental attitude in MOE and among all our educationists, of staying open to new ideas and engaging in careful experimentation, is what will keep the education system ready for the future.

Our Corporate Planning Teams will elaborate later this morning on the initiatives that MOE will focus on in the next few years. Let me take the opportunity to provide a broad perspective of the way ahead. It may first be useful to set out the strengths and advantages that we should build on, and the weaknesses and gaps that need addressing.

As a system, the key advantage of Singapore education is that it is well-structured and efficient in providing educational pathways and differently paced curricula to cater to the different abilities of our students. Our teachers are capable, well motivated and energetic - a class act, by any international standard. Across the board, our students go further than their counterparts internationally because of these advantages. 80% of our students now proceed to post-secondary education. Many continue to upgrade, from ITE through to polytechnic or polytechnic through to university.

The education we provide is rigorous, not shallow. Our students are encouraged in school to work hard and master something more than they can do with ease. They are aided by a culture that continues to place a high premium on achievement. It produces a degree of stress all round - although evidently less so than in China and in many schools and colleges in India. Some of the stress is unhealthy, but if well-managed, the fact that we have a system with some intensity, the fact that it challenges every student, is a major positive for Singapore. (It is quite unlike developments elsewhere that many of you would have read about in recent weeks, where schools are now paying students to work hard and do well. Or where the grading system is adjusted so that fewer students fail.)

Our competitive, ability-driven system produces a workforce with skills valued in the global market. Even today, in the most difficult of times, every MNC head that I meet tells me that the quality of our workforce is a major competitive advantage. Our workers have real skills, and are able to pick up new skills on the job. We produce highly capable managers, engineers, accountants and other professionals. It is what allows thousands of global companies to invest in Singapore and use it as their base for the region. It is why Matsushita Electric announced two days ago that it is investing another $160 million in Singapore to set up a DVD recorder plant employing 2000 people, two weeks after announcing that it was investing $150 million to expand its semiconductor operations here. And it is why EDB is confident of getting $7.5 billion of manufacturing investments into Singapore this year, after getting $9 billion last year.

But education has to evolve. We have to prepare for the workplace of the future, which will be very different from the past. If we think we are doing all we need to do because it has worked in the past, we will be blindsided by the changes happening around us.

First, integrity and trustworthiness. That's why the best person a company can send into China as a finance manager will be a Singaporean. Second, dedication to work and to meeting targets. Singaporeans deliver, and take pride in doing so. Third, they are analytical, methodical and focused. That's why product development and improvements in manufacturing processes can be done competitively in Singapore.

Second, almost all the industry leaders feel that Singaporeans can do much better in communication and persuasion. I know that many of our Principals feel the same way. We have to do better in oral as well as written skills. Singaporeans are especially weak in the unplanned, informal give-and-take interaction that is essential in the business world. We have to be more willing to volunteer ideas before they are perfectly polished, argue the case and be challenged in real time.

Third, we do not produce enough people who can be leaders in each field. We produce many managers, good at problem solving and achieving predictability, but not enough leaders - people capable of creating and managing change, and inspiring and motivating others. As one of the industry leaders puts it, many Singaporeans are put in a position of leadership, but remain taskmasters, not leaders.

The views from these industry leaders are clearly generalised, but we should take them seriously. The gaps that they identify cannot be closed by education alone. But our schools are the key crucibles for shaping and nurturing the skills and habits of our young. Education remains the key to preparing Singapore for the future and for sustaining our sense of well-being as a people.

We have to build on the real, competitive strengths produced by our education system, and bridge the gaps that will matter more critically in an environment that is going through sea-change. The operating environment for Singapore has changed dramatically, and continues to do so. Some of our present strengths will become less compelling before long, as cities in coastal China and elsewhere catch up with us and exhibit the same strengths or more.

How we compete to make a living and how we grow our economy will have to change. We have to move up the food chain, to product innovation and the "R" in "R&D", not just the "D". We have to develop the skills and capabilities to develop our own brands, and build strong, internationally competitive companies. We have to work with Singaporeans from young, through education, to help Singapore move up and hold its own in this next plane in economic development.

To stay relevant and thrive in this environment, we have to move up the economic ladder by developing capabilities among all Singaporeans to innovate. We will need people with an inventive spirit. They must be willing to try new, untested routes, without fear of failure. We need people who can venture out to tap new opportunities, and to market their ideas and products anywhere in the world. Every worker has to be prepared to be flexible, to multitask, and to take responsibility. And we will need more Singaporeans with leadership abilities, able to inspire teams and organisations to take leaps of innovation.

The key focus for MOE in the coming years is therefore to nurture a spirit of Innovation and Enterprise among our students and teachers in our schools. We will focus on a few key initiatives. First, we will diversify our education structures and create more space for students to pursue their passions and develop special talents. Second, we will do more to help our schools broaden the educational experiences of their students. Innovation and enterprise is best fostered through a broad-based holistic education, allowing students to draw from a wide range of learning experiences. We will also encourage teachers to gain exposure outside the school, broaden their experiences, and help facilitate attachments for them in the business and community sectors. Third, to bring teachers, parents and students on board to support these improvements, we will broaden our measures of success and incentive structures. This includes introducing greater flexibility into the university admission system, and studying how we can broaden the school ranking system. Let me now briefly elaborate on how we will move the system forward in each of these critical areas over the next 2-3 years.

First, diversity. Our highly structured school system has provided a useful scaffold for the vast majority of students to scale high levels of achievement. It is a system that produces strong averages. On any measure, Singapore's educational performance averages are among the best in the world. However, too uniform and rigid a structure constrains how far young Singaporeans can go to develop varied talents and abilities. We need more peaks, not just high averages, and peaks in different areas of endeavour.

Diversity matters, if we are to build an environment that nurtures creative endeavour. As Sim Wong Hoo puts it to me, if everyone tries to be creative in the same way, then no one is creative.

In our next phase of development, we will need more diverse talents, and Singaporeans of different moulds. We need a culture that respects exceptional achievement, whether in science research, in business, the professions, the arts and other areas of life. Only if we nurture Singaporeans who are exceptional in their own way, can we be the natural hub for talent and enterprise from all over the world, and become one of the leading cities in Asia. This is the way in which we can hold our own against other major cities and grow opportunities for all Singaporeans.

We are therefore creating more diverse pathways, starting with the secondary school and junior college system, where we are opening up to integrated programme schools, various specialist schools and a few private schools, and to mainstream schools who wish to adopt an alternative curriculum. This re-structuring will loosen up the educational structure at key points to create a less bounded environment for those with talents in different fields to go as far as they can to realise their potential. There will also be more options and opportunities in the higher education sector. We have embarked on the expansion of the public university sector, through the transformation of National University of Singapore (NUS) into a multi-campus university, the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) into a comprehensive university, and the continued expansion of SMU. With the opening of Republic Polytechnic, the polytechnic sector will become more diverse and competitive.

Equally important, we must keep enhancing the quality of existing educational pathways and address the needs of students with all abilities. The Normal (Technical) course was introduced 10 years ago, as a bold initiative to provide all students with at least 10 years of education in schools, and prepare them for a post-secondary education. It has reduced attrition rates from the school system dramatically. With several years of experience now behind us, we have launched a review of the Normal (Technical) course, to see how we can customise teaching methods and curriculum content to better develop our more technically-oriented students, and better prepare them for their post-secondary education. We will seek to match the N(T) curriculum more closely with the needs of N(T) students in terms of content coverage, pedagogical approaches and assessment modes so as to provide them with a firm foundation to continue their education at ITE.

The N(T) curriculum will have more links to daily life. To sustain their interest in their learning, teaching approaches will also focus more on group work, oral presentations, creative activity and hands-on learning, and the use of IT. Alternative assessment methods such as individual and team coursework can also be explored, to supplement pen-and-paper tests.

In addition, we will provide for greater flexibility within the N(T) course. We will allow N(T) students with relatively strong abilities in certain subjects to proceed faster in those areas. They will be able to offer 1-2 N(A) subjects if they are able to. This flexibility allows us to better cater to some of our students' diverse abilities. We are already doing the same for N(A) students, who have, from this year, been allowed to do two 'O' level subjects at Sec 4.

However, dedicated and caring teachers are still the key to the successful nurturing of our students, including our N(T) talents. Those of us who listened to the project team comprising teachers from Hai Sing Catholic and Temasek Secondary last Saturday at MOE's Excel Day, which looked at ways of engaging our N(T) students, would know that there are many ways, besides the formal curriculum and the methods of the classroom, in which schools can develop a spirit of self-confidence in every child, get him to take greater ownership over his learning and get him to aspire.

I would encourage our schools to explore this further. Let's find creative ways to make our ability-based learning system work even better for our children.

Curriculum development is important work, which will continue to exercise our energies in the coming years. We will continue to realign our school curriculum, including both the formal and informal curriculum, to help foster innovation and enterprise.

We will continue to revise the curriculum to encourage students to develop key skills for the future - thinking, communication and other process skills - in all subjects and levels, through project work and by freeing up more space in the curriculum to allow for independent learning and experimentation.

We should retain and build on our strengths in mathematics and science. It remains an important differentiator in international markets, giving Singapore an important competitive advantage. However, we must ensure that all our students are able to think beyond narrow fields of specialisation, whether they are engineers or accountants. Every student should have a grounding in the humanities. It will help them develop an ability to deal with ambiguity, and situations where there is no right answer.

We are building opportunities for multidisciplinary learning and placing greater emphasis on developing critical thinking and communication abilities in the new JC curriculum. Our universities too have begun to depart from a model of relative specialization over the last few years.

We will also explore how we can give greater importance to the non-academic domain, so as to provide our students with richer learning experiences in school. A future of frequent and often unsettling change will call for more than academic abilities. It will require a certain tenacity among our young. They must have more of a spirit of 'can-do,' the willingness to try your hand at something new and untried, when something else fails. This tenacity will do our young well, and do Singapore well.

Co-Curricular Activities (CCAs) provide the best opportunities to develop these traits. Resilience, team spirit and leadership is most effectively developed outside the classroom, in the playing fields, in uniformed group activities, on expeditions, and through community involvement. These activities also provide valuable opportunities for inter-racial mixing and bonding in our schools and within school clusters.

We have to explore ways to enhance the CCA experience without increasing the overall load on students as well as teachers. A month ago, we widened the scope of CCA activities that schools can recognise, to include student-initiated activities and community activities organised by the Community Centres and Clubs that meet the school's objectives. We will continue to explore how we can free up constraints and leverage on outside resources so as to help schools use CCA as a platform for the holistic education of our children.

What counts most in schools is what happens between the teacher and the student, in the classroom and on the playing field. The teacher is critical in everything we want to do in instilling a spirit of innovation and enterprise in schools.

We cannot create this spirit of innovation and enterprise overnight. It has to be built up over time. We will have to find a variety of ways to spur our teachers on.

One of the ways we will do this is to give our teachers more opportunities to gain experiences outside the school. These outside encounters will allow them to work with and learn from colleagues in the business sector and other fields. They will gain experiences that will help them transmit lessons to their students that cannot be readily conveyed through books. It will also enable the teachers to network with these colleagues after they return to school.

This opportunity for teachers to step out of the school environment, broaden their experiences and gain fresh perspectives for Education will become an increasingly important part of their overall development. Today we have the Professional Development Leave Scheme or PDL Scheme. For every year that a teacher serves, he earns a month of half-pay leave. Currently, the teacher can start using this accumulated half-pay leave after six years of service. The scheme also provides for him to go on no-pay leave for up to one year after three years of service.

Our records show that most teachers use the PDL scheme to pursue post-graduate studies. However, only 5% of our schools are making full use of what is permissible under the PDL Scheme each year. We can therefore do more.

MOE will open up the range of options that teachers can do under the PDL Scheme, to enable them to broaden their experience. Instead of using the PDL solely to pursue further academic development, they will be able to use the PDL for industrial attachments, or for working with the community. They may also want to work on projects that can help enrich the classroom experience.

To encourage teachers to do so, MOE will also now provide teachers with full pay of up to 4 weeks if they should embark on their attachments during the school vacation.

Teachers will be responsible for initiating their own attachments. They are best placed to know where their interests are, and to know what experiences they need most for their own development. However, MOE will also facilitate by building up a network of contacts in the business and community sectors that teachers can choose to take advantage of. To get the initiative off the ground, the Teachers Network will link up with business and other organizations, and help put interested teachers in touch with them. A dedicated website will be set up to provide information and advice for our teachers on outside attachments. All of these efforts will help to create an active network that will encourage teachers who want to seek out meaningful and challenging attachments.

We will start the scheme in December. Several companies including Citibank, Creative Technology, IBM, Shell, PSA Corporation, Qian Hu and ST Engineering have already indicated their keenness to come on board and offer work attachments to our teachers, and I am sure many more will do so.

Here, I would also like to urge school leaders to help facilitate your teachers' efforts to gain broader experience. Some schools may wish to create ongoing ties with particular businesses or community bodies, for example those in the vicinity of the school, so as to allow sharing and accumulation of knowledge amongst their teachers. The role that you play is not just in opening up the opportunities for your teachers, but in demonstrating to them that you see this as a valuable form of capability development. Jurong Junior College, for instance, has been creating opportunities for its teachers to interact with members of the community and business sectors. MDs and CEOs from the private sector, senior journalists, and other school principals are invited to sharing sessions at the JJC student-run café. JJC teachers have also taken advantage of these sharing sessions to work out short informal attachments with companies and other external organisations. The possibilities are many once we put our minds to it.

Finally, let me talk about the need to re-shape our incentive systems, to support our efforts to provide a broad-based holistic education in our schools. We have to explore how we can refine the way we measure the performance of schools, as well as the systems of student admission to some of our schools and to our universities.

Our schools are doing their part to nurture the desired outcomes of a broad-based education. But we need the right incentives to reinforce their efforts, and parents and students need to support them. Our incentives should strengthen the alignment between what is required for students to thrive in the workplace and society of the future, what we do in education, and what parents think is important.

First, we will take the opportunity, with the emergence of a more diverse school landscape, to review and broaden the school ranking system. The introduction of school ranking has had a salutary effect on our schools, even if it is not the most popular of educational instruments. It offers schools an important tool for benchmarking their achievements. It also allows us to identify good practices in schools that we can use to improve the entire system. If we do not try to measure and compare educational outcomes, we will deny our schools an important source of information for active reflection and improvement. Making school performance transparent has also allowed parents to make more informed choices.

However, while ranking is a vital tool for evaluation and informed action, it is only a means and not an end to what we do. If we become obsessed with measures of performance, especially singular and narrow measures, and shape and calibrate our responses around the raising of ranking positions alone, we do no justice to either our students or our teachers. Excessive teaching to the test will often result, at the expense of true learning.

We should therefore not confuse ranking with our goal in education, which is to develop students holistically so that they are prepared for the challenges of the future. As it stands today, ranking provides only a part of the information that schools need in seeking excellence in education. 

The ultimate measure of success in education is how well our students eventually meet the demands and challenges of the real world. Do they have the qualities to be a good citizen? Do they have the skills and abilities that employers want? Employers tell us that they look at more than just academic grades when hiring their staff. And they tell us that once hired, it is the intelligence, drive, team spirit, adaptability, leadership skills and integrity of the person which usually shapes who rises to the top of the firm or organisation. Consider even the leading firms. They all take in people with reasonably good academic results. But Janet Ang of IBM tells me that those with outstanding academic results often do not out-do the rest. Those who have excellent CCA achievements, on the other hand, generally do very well. Lee Tzu Yang, Chairman of the Shell Companies in Singapore, tells me that the people in Shell who perform the best after 5 years on the job are those who exhibit strong interest in areas outside their immediate responsibilities. They have strong reasoning skills, lateral thinking abilities, and the ability to network with and influence others. Their success does not correlate very sharply with their academic history. Michael Dee, Managing Director of Morgan Stanley (Southeast Asia), says he got his foot into the door at Morgan Stanley only because he was a nationally ranked figure skater in the US and was singled out at the University of Pennsylvania for his strong record of community service, not his academic grades. (He was also the first young analyst in Morgan Stanley without a masters degree who got promoted to the position of associate.) He tells me that when he hires his own staff now, he often looks for achievements outside the classroom as a predictor of the person's ability to succeed in the investment banking industry. It is a fiercely competitive industry, but it is the competition of teams.

Our schools are seeking to nurture the traits that matter for eventual success in the real world. We will thus consider how to broaden the ranking system to more fully reflect their educational mission and the importance of holistic education. We have established a committee chaired by Mr Chan Yeng Kit, Deputy Secretary (Policy) in MOE, to study this carefully. The committee, which comprises working groups of principals, teachers and educationists from HQ, will consult widely with schools. The committee's recommendations on how best to enhance the ranking system will be ready by March next year. One possibility it is looking at is to leverage on the Masterplan of Awards, which recognises and reward schools in a wide range of achievements and best practices.

We are also moving towards a more flexible system of admissions to some of our schools and to the universities, which does not rely on a single score. There will be greater diversity in the education landscape with the establishment of specialised independent schools and new educational programmes like the Integrated Programme in our schools. Specialised Schools will be free to establish their own admissions systems to identify the specific talents they cater to, so long as admissions criteria are transparent and based on merit. MOE will not set any conditions to the admissions criteria that privately-funded schools wish to set. Over time, IP schools may also consider whether they wish to modify their systems of admission to meet the objectives of their programmes.

At the tertiary level, the review of the university admissions system is underway. The Committee chaired by Prof Chong Chi Tat is examining alternative ways in which the universities can assess and recognise a student's suitability for entry. The universities and their faculties could be given greater flexibility in deciding on the admission of students so as to recognise different strengths and talents, while ensuring the quality of their intake.

MOE has set its sights on the future. In the next few years, MOE will focus on fostering innovation and enterprise across the education system. We will provide opportunities to develop more peaks of excellence, inject greater diversity, develop thinking and communication skills, and leverage on CCAs. We will enable our teachers, and seek to broaden their experiences. And we will shape incentives to support the objectives of a broad-based education for all our pupils.

As school leaders, you play an important part in seeing through these improvements to bring education in Singapore to greater heights. Your quality of leadership, your ability to mobilise the talents, aspirations and strengths of your teachers, to excite your students and to draw on the energies of parents, employers and our other stakeholders, will make all the difference. My colleagues at the Ministry and I look forward to working with you to prepare our young for the challenging future ahead of them.