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8 - Reform Implementation Lessons

A Case Study of High-Performing Singapore

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2021

By
Saravanan S. Gopinathan  and
Edmund Lim
Edited by
Colleen McLaughlin  and
Alan Ruby
Colleen McLaughlin
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Alan Ruby
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Summary

Singapore is an improbable success story in the design and implementation of education reforms that transformed a small, resource starved port into a nation, indispensable to first the region, then globally. This chapter illustrates policy formulation and implementation challenges in unifying a school system that had been segmented by media of instruction to aid rapid and transformative industrialisation. It refers to the successes in enhancing access to education and the difficulties posed by hasty and poorly implemented policy of school bilingualism and documents how these were overcome. This globally oriented system embraced choice, competition and branding and changed curricular and pedagogic frameworks, enhanced TVET, re-positioned the universities and upgraded teacher education. While this has underpinned a system which ranks highly in all international comparisons of educational quality, the policies and practices are not a package or simple formula for others to embrace, they are a product of time and place and are likely to change as Singapore looks to the future.

Keywords

education and economic developmenteducation qualitynation statesbilingualismSingapore
Type
Chapter
Information
Implementing Educational Reform
Cases and Challenges
 , pp. 149 - 170
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

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