An important part of this shift has been the flexibility we are injecting into our system of ability-driven education.
The fundamentals of the system are sound. We recognise different abilities, set curricula that students can realistically master and help each student to proceed at a pace that he can manage. When we introduced streaming in schools over 25 years ago, it brought dropout rates down sharply. Many more students have been able to stay engaged in learning, and the vast majority now progress on to a tertiary education. Today, only 3 per cent or less of our students drop out before completing secondary school. We are not happy with 3 per cent, and Senior Parliamentary Secretary Masagos (Zulkifli) is looking into ways we can reduce it further.
But we have avoided the large attrition rates that we see in many other countries, where undifferentiated schooling leads to a large number of students being disengaged from learning.
In the US for instance, 30 per cent of students fail to complete high school. In New York City, 53 per cent of girls and 61 per cent of boys drop out without completing high school.
However, nothing that we do in ability-driven education is an article of faith. All our approaches - our different streams and differentiated teaching methods - are simply practical ways to help students grow and develop as best they can. We judge our approaches only by their effectiveness. And where we can improve them, we will do so.
Neither is ability-driven education about setting students on a fixed path for all time. It is about
responding to students' abilities at each point in time, helping them to prepare for the next step in their learning and encouraging them to aspire to go higher, at every step of the way. The stream or course you go to in school does not define you for life.
We are refining our ability-driven education, so that we keep and strengthen this open-endedness. We are introducing more flexibility in the system - more opportunities to move up at each step of the way, more fluidity between the different streams in schools. There are three good reasons why we are doing so.
First, we have to allow for the fact that some children develop late, or develop the motivation to do well later than others. Some students start off slow, but can catch up later.
We should keep the system open for them. And we must always expect surprises - expect students to develop in surprising ways and surpass early expectations.
We have made it easier for schools to promote or transfer N(A) and N(T) students who do well, to the Express or N(A) courses respectively. Every year now, about 400 N(A) students are promoted and transferred to the Express course. A similar number of N(T) students are promoted or transferred to the N(A) course. Despite catching up late, most of these students did well.
Eighty-seven per cent of the N(A) students who transferred to the Express course qualified for the polytechnics - this is in fact higher than the 83 per cent for the bottom half of our Express students. Thirty-three per cent of the N(T) students who transferred to the N(A) course qualified for the polytechnics.
One student who has been crossing bridges is Chua Kim Wee, now a JC2 student studying in Nanyang Junior College. Kim Wee was from the EM3 stream in primary school, and was posted to the Normal (Technical) stream in secondary school. He worked hard, did well and caught up while in Montfort Secondary. The school assessed him carefully and let him cross over to the N(A) stream. Kim Wee did very well in his O levels, obtaining four distinctions, and will be sitting for his A levels shortly.
We must keep allowing students to cross bridges and keep an eye out for the surprises like Kim Wee.
We have not wanted to rush the way we have implemented these flexibilities. But we can gain confidence from the results to date. I would therefore encourage secondary schools to actively exercise the discretion that they have to identify students who can cross bridges between the streams and help them do so.
The second reason why we are evolving towards a more flexible system is to cater to students with uneven strengths and abilities. Few students are exceptional in every area and few students are weak in every subject. Most have some strengths and some weaknesses in their learning, and some areas of study that excite them more than others. We therefore need an approach that encourages every child to find his strengths, regardless of where he stands overall, and which provides him the opportunity to take his interests seriously.
We have moved progressively towards recognising students with uneven abilities. We have allowed N(A) students to offer up to two O- level subjects at Secondary 4, in the areas that they show greatest promise. And they have done well. N(T) students too have, from this year, been allowed to take up to two subjects at the N(A) level.
To help students discover their interests and strengths in practice-oriented subjects, we have also introduced Elective Modules and Advanced Elective Modules in schools. Some schools will be going further in time to come, to offer Applied Graded Subjects that are the full equivalent of an O-level subject.
We are moving in the same direction in primary schools - helping students to find distinct strengths and take them at a higher level. We started by liberalising the rules for Higher Mother Tongue. We will now be moving to a system of subject-based banding for the weaker students, which will replace the EM3 stream. I will say more about this later.
We are also recognising strengths outside of academic performance. That is why we have widened the scope for discretionary admissions into secondary schools and post-secondary educational institutes - so that students can be admitted not just on their performance in examinations, but on their talents in other areas. and be encouraged to further develop those talents.
Although some schools can now admit up to 50 per cent of their stdudents through discretionary selection, the overall numbers are still low. About 3 per cent of all students are now admitted to secondary schools and junior colleges through the Direct Schools Admission (DSA) exercise. We will gradually expand this, in small steps. MOE will also take a more flexible approach in recognising more schools with strong programmes as Niche Programme Schools, so as to encourage them to develop areas of excellence.
The third reason for introducing greater fluidity in our system of ability-driven education - and this is not any less important - is to encourage greater interaction among our students.
We already place students from different streams in the same schools. It gives students with different abilities the opportunities to interact with each other, work with each other and build up friendships. That is a strength of the Singapore system.
But there is more that we can do. We must do more through our CCAs and informal school programmes, to encourage every student to mix with a wider group, people different from him.
We have to go beyond the occasional activities, to the regular. We will also keep exploring what more we can do to allow for integration of students within the formal curriculum time.
This is why we will be making further refinements to our Gifted Education Programme. We must recognise the abilities of our intellectually gifted children and give them a learning environment that allows them to thrive. But we must also find ways to give them the rounded education that comes from regular opportunities to interact with the rest of their peers, and which will fit them out for life.
We should not shrink from providing the best chance for every talent to surface and grow.
We should be willing to differentiate our teaching and curriculum where useful, and not ask every student to conform to the average. We should never fall into a culture of discouraging students from being exceptional - or 'cutting tall poppies down to size', as the Australians put it. We must never feel that we are doing wrong by giving budding talents the best chance of shooting up. We need all the tall poppies we can get, whether in the sports and arts, or in maths and literature.
But we also know that the tallest poppies often grow in the open. Many leaders in business and the professions, or in government and community, will tell of how they had the benefit when they were young of growing up with friends of quite different abilities and backgrounds.
Like MM, for example, who has repeatedly said that it did him good to have started his school career in a modest rural school, as Telok Kurau Primary was then.
We should never underestimate the benefits of interacting, day in and day out, with people who may be different from you, but whom you live with, play with, work on projects with and who will share the same world as you.
We should therefore keep a careful balance in education - between providing the differentiated teaching that we need to nurture different abilities and talents, and allowing sufficient opportunity for interaction and for the habit of looking after each other to be formed. And we should encourage all our students, including those with academic difficulties, to find their strengths, aspire to go further and to learn something they did not previously think they could.
The fluidity that we are injecting into our ability-driven system is not just a matter of educational philosophy. It mirrors the way the workplace is moving in the innovation-driven industries that we must insert ourselves in. The organisational structures that were well suited to the old economy, with strict hierarchies and distinctions between employees with different skills, are being replaced by more flexible, flatter and more agile organisations.
Up and down the line, every worker has to deal with some complexity, learn to multitask and be willing to learn new skills quickly. That is how the innovation economy works. Stay agile and work in teams, or you are out of the game.
I will illustrate this with a few examples.
At Shell, chemical process technicians must now multitask and think on their feet. Their technicians are expected to go beyond handling just the process controls, to also handle equipment maintenance and troubleshooting. They must also have a good understanding of management issues like how to maximise plant output. And Shell also trains its technicians to be effective communicators and active members of their work teams.
Next example, Lucasfilm Animation Singapore. Lucasfilm looks for creative individuals with a hefty dose of raw talent. But they also need to be highly versatile, to switch between different types of creative tasks - from digital modelling to texturing and painting, and to rendering shots and sequences. Lucasfilm looks for artists with the enthusiasm to solve problems - people who not only try to figure out the solution to a problem but also improve the process while they are at it.
My third example may strike some as 'old economy'. At Singapore Customs, officers are constantly learning new skills and re-engineering the scope of work. The environment they work in is radically different from before. Not long ago, the job of a Customs officer was to prevent the entry of undesirable goods into the country. So Customs officers were trained in physical inspection and examination of cargoes.
However, Singapore Customs is now the key regulatory agency for trade. Officers who were previously schooled in physical cargo inspection have picked up new skills in trade documentation, so that they can approve trade permits, audit companies and investigate trade-related offences. More recently, Customs officers have again had to pick up new skills, to audit companies on their security policies and the measures they are putting into place to ensure that their supply chains are well protected against potential disruptions.
This is why diversity and flexibility has become the leitmotif of the education system. It is not a passing theme. The changes that we are making in education, step by step, are the way we are preparing young Singaporeans for the innovation-driven workplace. It is how we will make our living in the world.
We have to keep the system fluid, and avoid pigeonholing students. We must give them the responsibility to shape their own education - to find their own strengths, to ask themselves where their interests lie and to make their own choices in a more flexible system. And we should keep the geometry of an ability-driven education system open, keep refining it with experience and never fix things for all time.