Singapore’s Educational Success Story

An interview with Mike Thiruman, General Secretary of the Singapore Teachers’ Union (STU), on the country’s educational success story and what Latin America can learn from this model.

Transcript

Singapore’s success story

Mike Thiruman: I think that understanding is born out of necessity because we do not have any other resources at all; we are a gentle nation. Hence, we understand that people are our only resource. So if we need to develop anything, it is to develop people. Hence, our heavy investment in education and focus is just not the government; it is a cultural norm for Asians to invest in education.

In general, I mean, especially in Chinese culture, and Singapore is 75% Chinese, right? So that comes within the social aspect, and then the government just leverages that. If you see a piece of performance, international performances, international tests, benchmarking, we do well. They ease very close nexus from home and school to get that done. I think parents take huge responsibility and ownership over students’ education, especially in the early years. They are after 15 or 16 years old, depending on the child, but before that, it is what parents also bring to the table.

What can Latin America learn from Singapore?

Mike Thiruman: Nothing happens by accident. It has to be curated, choreographed, and intentional. There must be a systemic effort, right? You cannot take a piece-meal approach and expect things to work. There are no quick fixes; everyone must understand that this is the direction we are heading towards, and every part of the system must work to achieve the goal. So, in education, there’s curriculum, there’s technology, but a very key component are the teachers, right? A lot of countries pay lip service to the importance of teachers. Everyone says, “the teacher’s important,” but you look at budgetary expenditure, resource endowment in terms of teacher development, teacher recruitment, teacher retention, that is very little, right?

In Singapore, we understand that the teacher is key. So, from the recruitment aspect, from the very beginning, when we recruit the teachers, we select from the top 30th percentile of the cohort, ok? And even that is very competitive. For every one teaching position, there would be 8 to 10 applicants in the 30th percentile, top 30th percentile, right? From recruitment all the way in terms of career development, pre-service training, allowing teachers to develop when they are in service, they use a lot of emphases.

We must create the buying, right, amongst the public, amongst the teachers, with the educational professionals in the lead. I think the greatest issue is that there are too many cooks when it comes to education. When that happens, nothing good happens, right? We must understand: there are very few people who intervene and say, “This is what the defense of the country should be”, right? But when it comes to education, because we have all gone through schools, we all think we know what education should be. We all can speak about it; hence, it creates, we all seem to be experts in education. Is that the greatest danger now?

In Singapore’s case, that alignment happens because it is aligned with the economy. What is the economy’s trajectory? Where do we want to go in 10 years, 15 years, and 30 years? Can we plan towards it? When, in 30 years, if I wanted in 15 years, if I wanted to develop this particular industry, would I have the manpower, the skill power, to get that done? So, there is a very close relationship in Singapore’s education system with the economic outcomes that the country tries to achieve. It may not be so in other countries, so the alignment becomes more diversified in other countries, but core skills, we should know what we want to develop in our students and what towards it.

I think, in Singapore’s case, the alignment happens because we are clear about our fundamentals, that, at the end of the day, when the child graduates, he must begin, he must have gained full employment. Either he does something on his own, or he can be employed. If those two do not happen, then the education system has failed, right? Then, we will walk back to what’s, or step forward in terms of economic planning in 15 years down the road. What industries are we looking at? If you are still looking at car manufacturing, as it is now, you know, 15 years down the road it will be very different, but if you are preparing the child for car manufacturing as it is now, he’s not going to have a job, right? Then, we have failed; society has failed, right? I think that is where we are a bit clearer in what we need to achieve.

I think every country has looked at that and said: “What do we foresee for our own country in terms of its growth areas?” It is nice to talk about education as a holistic endeavor to develop the child. #e all do that, right? And it must be done, but if it fails the child and, after graduating from university he’s still unemployed, one year, two years, three years, now you’re going to have a major social issue, right? Youth unemployment. It’s not something you would want, especially youth unemployment among the graduates, right? While after grade 10, many of us may say, “ok, I’m willing to do manual work.” And there will always be some manual work to be done. I can do it. Yeah, I’ll be gainfully employed, not very high employment in terms of compensation but gainfully employed. However, a university student, a graduate of a university, he’s not going to say “I’m going to do manual work, I want to do some creative work, use my mind.”

Teacher empowerment, skills, and working conditions

Mike Thiruman: I think teacher ownership, teacher leadership, and teacher autonomy are very critical. It means you have competent professionals, right? Autonomy comes with responsibility, right? So, you cannot say, “I want to be autonomous, but I don’t take any responsibility.” So, in my mind, hence earlier, I mentioned teacher recruitment, teacher development, because you develop a competent professional. Once you’ve developed the competent professional, let him do his job. But the issue further is, do we have competent professionals in our classrooms? Have we put a well-qualified person in front of our children? Right? That herein lies the issue, because many of us have not done it, so everyone else wants to intervene. Nobody tells a surgeon how to do his job. I’m not going to lie down on the operating table and tell them how to do it; he’s competent, I trust. We like that same trust because the competency is not clearly established. It must be multi-prompted; if first, we must understand that this is a priority. I must get the best people into the classrooms. Then, I invest in terms of recruitment, in terms of pre-service training and in-service training.

What do we do with the people we already have? Raise the standards. As a unionist, I am not going to tell you to fire them. Raise the standards and build the competencies. It is a mutual promise that we need to undertake this endeavor to raise the standards. Can we facilitate raising the average just up? Yes: you can use technology, you can reinvent your curriculum, and you can produce enough materials or resources for an average teacher to improve his teaching skills. All that can be done, and that’s wh
at we did. When I’m talking about competent professionals and recruiting from the top 30%, it has not always been the case for Singaporeans either, right? We only started this journey in, probably, 1981, when we realized that we needed to ensure that we had to have the best people as teachers if we wanted to revamp the education system. And it was a journey.

While recruiting the good ones, we cannot run away from the fact that salaries have something to do with it. The problem with a lot of people is, people say “teaching is a noble job, you must do it with your heart. Hence you should not talk about salary…” I am a pragmatic person, right? The Maslow hierarchy tells you that if you cannot fulfill your basic needs, your higher needs cannot be attained. Teachers are humans. You cannot say you must work for the cheapest salary base, lower salary base, and do your best. That is not going to happen. So, we must meet halfway, to say, “we will reward, we will recompense, but these are the standards. This will be our contract,” social contract, right? We will pay this much, but we are going to expect this much. If we pay this much, you can only expect this much, and somebody has to take responsibility, because we all have a finite amount of resources, and every single penny must be spent well, alright?

We made a choice in Singapore to say that if we wanted these quality teachers, then something has to give way, and one of the things that have given way, in terms of compromise, is our classes, right? While developed Western nations may have perpetuated this notion of smaller-class sizes, we have classes of 40. It is not necessarily small, but the choice, the alternative is you split the class, 20 each, and then you have to lower the standard of teachers, you have to double the number of teachers. Hence you’ll eventually lower the standard of teachers. You have to pay less; you need two people, right? So instead of getting from the top 30th percentile, now you have to lower maybe up to even 50th percentile, right? Then, you are back to square one. So, it’s a call that we made. We know that our class sizes are larger than the OCDE averages, but would you prefer a well-qualified, good person in front of the 40 or an average so-so in the front 20? Make an adjustment call.

If you present it that way because people might be under the impression “no, you should be able to hire good people for even the 20,” the reality is such that it is not going to happen. You still have to pay. You still have to have classroom sizes, the kind of resources that are needed. It is going to bust the government budget. You have to, right? But even in a classroom of 40, I can still have every child talking, right? Again, it comes back to using pedagogy: is the teacher competent enough? Ok? Most of them, I mean, if I use the craftsman example, most teachers only have one tool in their toolbox. That is the hammer, right? Everything, to teach everything to every child, they just hammer, and they think it fixes the problem. It doesn’t. Sometimes you need a screwdriver. Sometimes you need a saw, right? But you’re fully hammering your toolkit, that’s all you’re going to use, and it’s not going to be effective, alright?

Skills development of teachers is very important, integration of technologies is important, a lot of schools invest a lot of money in interactive smartboards, but if you’re going to classrooms and observe, teachers still use the blackboard, right? Because they don’t know how to use it, we have the technology, and we say, “technology has arrived in our classrooms.” I’ll say, “think again. It has not. You have just replaced a cheap blackboard with a very expensive smart blackboard.” The teaching style has not changed, right? The teacher just uses a digital platform. It has not transformed teaching. Whereas it can transform if you have equipped the teacher, right? This lack of follow-through, even in terms of professional development, governments and schools spend a lot of money in professional development, the teachers go for a two-day, three-day workshop, come back to school, they go back to whatever they were doing before because there’s no accountability, there’s no ownership, there’s no responsibility, nobody’s going to follow up! Right? Nobody says what you should learn, “can I see it in your classroom tomorrow?” We will see how we can get this done. It does not happen, so.

The struggle of teacher unions around the world

Mike Thiruman: We should be, as teachers have our students’ growth and development at the core. Start from there. You will not go wrong. If you think that, as a teacher unionist, we should only be focused on teachers’ welfare and compensation, we are starting with the wrong end in mind. If you start from the child and work backwards, and my take is – the child must be. If there’s no child, I don’t have a vocation. I mean, even if I say “you still need to pay me well” and all of that, but teaching is still a vocation, right? It’s still a noble profession. It starts with the child, and if there’s no child, there’s no teacher

Coming back, putting the child at the center, and then, in my mantra, is “teacher well-being, student well-being.” If the teacher is not well equipped if the teacher is not of the right frame of mind, nothing is going to go well in the classroom, and eventually, the children will suffer. So, how do we ensure that we prepare our children for their future? Then, equip the teachers with those skills and resources necessary to get the job done. Teacher stress, teacher burnout, is not merely about workload; it’s about being demoralized, right? Once you have a demoralized teacher, no matter what you do, you are not going to get the kind of student achievement we want. Focus on the teacher from a policy perspective.

We have this simple saying in Singapore: the principals take care of the teachers; the teachers take care of the students. If from outside you want to take care of the children, you are not going to do that, because, before all, the teacher is in charge. We can do whatever we want with policy instruments and leaders. Ultimately, if the teacher does not agree, it is not going to work. So, focus on developing the teacher, and let the teacher take care of the child. It is our job, it’s my job as a teacher, to look after the children, not the principal per se, not the policy, not the minister.

The future of education

Mike Thiruman: We need to adapt, and we need to decide in the classroom how we want to change things; the broad benchmarks are there, baselines have been established – at least in Singapore’s case. Then, again, put the child at the center, every child, and create multiple pathways. There’s no longer a single diet for everyone (OFF: there’s not a one size fits all), no, definitively has not been, it will no longer be, alright? I’ll give an example: my eldest boy just finished college, just finished GCE levels and he’s going to go into the army. He’s a kayaker. He’s a heavy sportsman, so he needed a curriculum that will fit, right? But, I think it has not quite fit in yet. He has different interests, which in the compartmentalized world of teaching, and even in universities, cannot be matched, right? Engineering is engineering; science is science, chemistry, and literature don’t meet. (OFF: everything is in silos) Silos! Right? You look at it, that’s how our curricular means, right? And at university, if you’re trying to match them, it’s huge chaos you’re creating in the minds of children because they’
ve studied this way.

We need to start opening up, to say that, if you want to study science, chemistry, and literature, you should be able to, right? All the – it has to be inter and multidisciplinary, right? And the notion that you, you mentioned this, in whatever we pursue, we need to think like the disciplinarian, right? If you’re studying mathematics, think like a mathematician, right? It’s a fundamental skill that we all lack, and we have not done it because we teach content, math as if it’s knowledge. That is our greatest problem. It is a solution to a problem. Pythagoras theorem is a solution to a problem that he encountered 2,000, 3,000 years ago, and he solved it, right? If you present it that way, then every discipline is solving some problem, right? Then, we would be in a better place.

Lifelong Learning

Mike Thiruman: This notion of lifelong learning, is being embedded in every level of society, right? We no longer talk about employment, we talk about employability, right? How do you stay employable, right? Skill sets. Whether you are self-employed or employed by somebody else, right? The Singapore government has invested a lot of money in training and re-training people. The universities, the polytechnics, indeed, all the, all the five schools that we have and the institutes of education have started continuous education programs for adults to go to. We’ve begun a university for working adults.

The government has given, they call it “Skills Future Credit,” 500 dollars to every Singaporean who’s above 25 years old and is given 500 dollars to go learn something, anything! It started, so the government has not plowed money into it because not much of it is being used. At the moment, I think only about 30% of that money has been used, so the government is not going to plow more money, but if it’s going to be depleted, the government is more than happy to plowing. So, just to encourage people to go learn, anything, does not have to, it’s money the government gives you for you just to study, learn something new, all right? It might not be your job-related, it can be anything. Go learn a new language, ok? We just want to encourage this notion that we must continuously learn, learning never stops, right? Take up a course, be it formal, informal, bite-size, Ph.D., anything. (OFF: learning is) learning, yeah (OFF: or destination) so, that’s how we have framed our education for the kids now. One, we have four outcomes to achieve when a student graduates from general education: one is to be a confident person, the other to be an active contributor, a constant citizen, and the key one, a self-directed learner. So, we need to ensure that we achieve these four outcomes in the child, that he’s always passionate about learning.

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