ESTIMATES OF EXPENDITURE FOR THE - FINANCIAL YEAR 1ST APRIL, 1995 TO 31ST MARCH, 1996
Sir, I wish to thank all Members who have spoken for their continued interest in the field of education. Since so many items have been raised, I will be only answering some of them. But I wish to assure all Members that I will give every item my individual attention. It is just to share out the work that I can only answer some of their queries. First, I would like to touch on the question of the teaching career. The success of an education system depends critically on the quality and morale of the teaching staff. It is therefore a primary concern of my Ministry that our teachers are well looked after and that we continue to attract good recruits to the education service. With the recent restructuring of civil service personnel management, a Personnel Board chaired by PS (PMO) now has full authority to recruit Education Officers and to decide on their promotion into all grades below superscale. The PS and Director (Education) are members of the Board. This new arrangement has meant greater authority and flexibility for my Ministry to recruit and reward good officers. With effect from 1st February 1995, a total of 2,456 Education Officers were promoted to two intermediate salary scales. These are the General Education Officer (GEO) IA for graduates and GEO IIA for non-graduates. This promotion exercise is significant in two aspects. Firstly, the number promoted is big: more than 10% of the 22,000 Education Officers were promoted. Secondly, it enables classroom teachers to be promoted whilst they remain as teachers, without having to take on additional responsibilities. Before the introduction of these intermediate grades, teachers could only remain on one long salary scale, GEO I or GEO II, unless they took on leadership roles as Heads of Department, vice-principals or principals and were promoted to the senior scales. This promotion exercise has been welcomed by the teachers' unions and has generally gone down well, judging by the few complaints that my Ministry has received. Understandably, in any promotion exercise, those who are not promoted may feel disappointed. However, I wish to assure all teachers that the January 1995 exercise is only the first of a series of promotion exercises to promote deserving teachers into the intermediate grades. The next exercise will be in October this year and I expect thereafter, it will be held once a year. Those promoted so far include 11 principals and 221 vice-principals who were still on the basic scale despite their responsibilities and years of service. So I think it is high time that we promoted this group of people. Priority was also given to promote 1,240 serving Heads of Department (HODs) with at least two years in the post. This second group deserves priority because they are taking on additional responsibility besides their teaching load, and we have experienced difficulty in attracting teachers to become HODs. We are looking into this problem. One way is to give them priority in promotion. Besides these, a total of 822 classroom teachers were promoted. These are teachers with at least five years of service and consistently good performance. They were recommended by their school principals based on their ranking of the teachers in the school by performance. Of the 2,456 officers promoted, 60% or 1,462 are non-graduates. This corresponds roughly to the 63% of the total population of Education Officers who are non-graduates. Thus, both graduates and non-graduates have a similar chance of being promoted. The prospects of career advancement are also similar for those teachers who are able and willing to serve in leadership positions. Besides the improved promotion prospects for classroom teachers, my Ministry also needs to attract and retain outstanding officers who are able and willing to take up leadership positions. Such officers, both scholars and non-scholars, need to be identified early and given challenging assignments with appropriate rewards so that they will grow rapidly to assume leadership positions in schools and at MOE headquarters. Faster promotion time-norms will be implemented for good officers. I wish now to touch briefly on some of the concerns which Mr Peh has mentioned as reasons for the low morale of the teachers who spoke to him. First, a point of clarification. He mentioned that last year 400 teachers who had less than three years of service resigned. This is, I am afraid, not correct. Last year, in fact, 576 teachers resigned for various personal and other reasons, not just work pressure alone. Of these teachers, 95 (and not 400) had less than three years of service. The situation in the Ministry of Education is that the manning position is fairly stable. If you look at 576, it is a big number. But if you divide it by 22,000 teachers, it is only about 3%. I think we are lucky because we still have a very big group of dedicated teachers who have committed their whole life to teaching and these are people who are on the pension scheme. Unfortunately, we are now on the CPF scheme and as more of them come in on the CPF scheme, I think it will be harder to retain them. We will have to look into how we can keep these new teachers who are on the CPF scheme. More and more of the teachers who resigned are those on the CPF scheme. Back to Mr Peh Chin Hua's point. Firstly, regarding the retention of pupils, this was discussed last year when he raised it. My Ministry has found it more effective to channel pupils into different streams so that they could be taught and could progress at the rate according to their ability. In the past, weak pupils could not cope even if they were retained in classes which catered to average pupils. Secondly, concerning school discipline, I wish to assure all teachers that MOE is fully behind them if they have to enforce discipline according to the school regulations. However, it is better that corporal punishment be vested only in the principal, the vice-principal or designated teachers and carried out after due processes and not in anger. This is to protect both teachers and pupils. As for administrative and ECA duties, some of these responsibilities go with the job of teaching. Wherever possible, MOE has computerised and automated the various administrative tasks to compensate for our perennial shortage of clerical workers which affects not only the schools and the Ministry, but I think the whole of Singapore. Nevertheless, the Ministry is trying harder to recruit more supporting staff and has given funds to schools to enable them to try and hire part-time staff on their own. Unfortunately, so far, they have not been very successful. Next, I wish to turn to the important issue of how to teach and develop creativity in our schools and in the education system. This has given rise to some commentaries and reports in the papers recently and I wish to thank the two Members for raising this issue. I agree with hon. Members that it is important to teach young Singaporeans to think critically and creatively and to learn independently so that they are better equipped to face the challenges of the future. The questions are: how to do it and what can we realistically expect to achieve. I have asked my officers to look further into this issue. Our education system has kept to the fundamentals and is highly structured, with a clear syllabus, continual assessment and examinations to make sure our pupils learn. Pupils are channelled into different streams according to ability and taught appropriate subjects at the pace they can cope with. Our bilingual policy requires pupils to learn their mother tongue and be proficient in English so that they can master the other subjects. In contrast, some Western countries have for years been taken up with the concept that children should be left to discover things for themselves, to be creative. There are no set curricula, no examinations and little homework. The end result is that many adults are barely able to read and write. Our education system has done well as measured by examination results which have improved remarkably over the years. This applies to the broad mass of pupils and not just the top ones. The rising level of education has enabled our economy to grow strongly over the past 30 years. The steady improvement in examination performance has, however, given rise to doubts that our pupils have become too examination-oriented with little time and inclination for independent learning. It has also been observed that some NUS students have difficulty expressing themselves clearly or coping with the thinking skills of a university education. We must of course bear in mind that the percentage of students enrolled in our two universities has doubled over the past decade and the bright students tend to be attracted to popular courses like medicine, law and business administration. The language ability of our students varies but the important thing is that they should be able to express themselves with sufficient clarity to communicate effectively in their chosen fields. Our education system has developed in response to pressure from our society which has tended to focus on examination results. In this information age when a vast amount of knowledge can be accessed by the touch of a button, it is important to teach students how to find and process information rather than merely acquiring a vast amount of knowledge. Since 1987, schools have been offered the CORT, which stands for Cognitive Research Trust, Thinking programme developed by Edward de Bono. The programme teaches critical and creative thinking to lower secondary pupils. In the module on creativity, pupils are taught to generate ideas and to break out of established patterns of thinking and to look at things in a different way. Using the processes advocated, pupils learn to generate creative and practical solutions to problems. At present, 103 secondary schools have adopted this programme. As an extension of the current thinking programme, my Ministry is working on a programme to incorporate core thinking skills into the learning of subjects and to make thinking more pervasive in the curriculum. However, it takes time for pupils to acquire these skills and be able to integrate thinking into the learning process. A fundamental question is whether creativity can be taught or is largely inborn. Not everyone can learn to be an artist, although most pupils can learn to draw simple objects. Higher order thinking skills may be beyond the reach of a large number of pupils. In this connection, I would like to inform Members that my Ministry will be expanding the Gifted Education Programme which caters to our brightest pupils. The plan is progressively to double the intake from about 0.5% of each cohort to about 1% by 1998. The intake at Primary Four will increase from 200 to 400 pupils and that at Secondary One, from 50 to 100 pupils per year. To conclude, I would like to say that I agree in general with the sentiments of the Members that this is an area which deserves careful study to make sure that we do not lose out in terms of our flexibility and ability to think and learn independently. But we must be realistic about the possibilities. I think it is not everybody who can do this. But if we can improve on the speaking skills, thinking skills, then I think we should do our utmost to try and achieve it. As quoted just now, there is some movement in Japan which is doing the same thing. The difference between the Western system and our system is that ours is more Asian and tends to be more structured and rigid, and it makes sure that large numbers of pupils learn a set amount of knowledge. In the West, they tend to be more free. So you get a wide variation in the standards of achievement. But at the same time, they tend to be more creative, I believe. So the question is how to strike a medium between the two. But I am afraid some parents may object because if we start doing this, then the questions may in fact become harder for the children, and not easier. 2.00 pm Next, I would like to take up the question on the ranking of schools since I have answered this question recently from Mr Low Thia Khiang. I think the sentiments expressed are not dissimilar. The general thrust of Mr Peh Chin Hua and Dr Ow Chin Hock is that they are in support of the ranking of schools. There are certain advantages. It provides information about these good schools and it adds a certain amount of competition and in our context we cannot avoid competition. The main point is to avoid over-competition, to make sure that we do not over-emphasise the academic aspects at the expense of the other areas which are necessary for the total development of the pupil. If Mr Peh Chin Hua is aware of any school where the teachers tend to set difficult questions so as to get rid of the weaker pupils, he should let me know. I would be very surprised if there are schools like this. I believe all our schools are doing their best to try and teach their pupils. The question on the Normal Stream is a separate one which will be taken up separately. But in general terms, as a result of ranking, of course schools are competing harder. But I do not think they go out of their way to get rid of their weak pupils, and they should not do this. If any school is doing that, I would like to look into it. Let me have the information. Also, I do not think it is really true that the principals will pressurise their teachers so much that if they do not produce results, they would be got rid of. I am not sure this is in practice. But again, if there are instances, please let me know. The Ministry is giving attention to all the schools, and not only to the top schools. In fact, as I have explained before, very often it is the weaker pupils who require more attention and the job of teachers in the neighbourhood schools is, in some respects, more difficult than the job of teachers in the top schools. Of course, the challenges are different. Teachers who might do very well in a top school where there is a lot of intellectual stimulation and interaction may not do equally well in a school where you need a lot of patience and understanding of the pupils. So we do post the principals and teachers around but we must make sure that we fit the right teachers into the right schools, and not do it just for the sake of doing it. Dr Ow Chin Hock has proposed various refinements to the ranking system. As I said before, I am open to ideas. If there are ways we can improve on it, I would like to do it. But we should give it some time and see how it goes before we make any further changes. For example, how do we rank ECA? Of course, we may have a subjective basis but then it is open to question. And the public somehow still tends to focus on examination results. If you are complaining that in fact there is already too much competition and you add in further elements of ECA, and so on, would that not further compound the problem? So we would like to study this further. As I said, if Members have good ideas on how we can refine the system, I would welcome them. Next, I wish to turn to the question of the setting of the Singapore-Cambridge GCE examinations which arose last year because of the loss of some scripts. The Ministry has studied this question carefully and come to the conclusion that it is better to stay with the present system for various reasons. One, the examination is very well recognised internationally. Two, the quality has been consistently very good and Cambridge has built up a good pool of teachers, assessors and examiners who can set very good and original questions. And this arrangement is also good from the point of view of security, despite this one incident of loss of some scripts, and also from the point of view of lack of bias. Because Singapore is a very small country, it is important that we have a good system that is fair. From the point of view of cost, there will be no cost saving even if we do it ourselves because I think our examiners will have to be paid and the rates will not be different from what the UK teachers are being paid. So, overall, there will be no saving. Having said that, I would like to assure Members that, of course, we want to build up expertise within the Ministry in this important area. So the Ministry will be progressively more involved with Cambridge to see how we can develop some expertise in this area. But, on balance, we feel that it is better for us to stay with the present system. Next, there are various questions about the universities. Firstly, the Open University programme. Mr Sinnakaruppan has asked about the recent introduction of the Bachelor of Technology programme at NUS and what this means for the Open University programme. Just some background on this programme. This idea came out from the National Science and Technology Board and the NUS. They feel that it is good if we can have a programme on a part-time basis to enable engineers who are working on the shop floor to upgrade themselves without having to leave their jobs to go overseas, for example. These are people who could make very good R&D people, if you give them the additional knowledge. They could also become good shop floor engineers. So the idea came to me and I thought it was good. We should start, and they are ready to start, very soon from 1st July or early July this year. It makes use of the lecturers from the university. It also makes use of the workshop and laboratory facilities in the university. So we can start off very quickly and I expect the first batch will be about 100 students. This does not mean that the Open University programme is now out of the question. I think that is still possible. But in the case of the Open University of UK, I believe they are more experienced in the area of non-technical subjects, ie, more in the area of English Language, Mathematics, Humanities, where there is no need for much hardware. So if you want to do it with the Open University, it may be possible but we have to develop further courseware and also we have to find out how to get the facilities to teach these pupils. So for the Open University, it may take some time. But I think it is not ruled out. As far as the Open University is concerned, our thinking is still the same and, that is, we want to use the Open University as a venue for those who have missed on the educational opportunities to come back and upgrade themselves on a part-time basis. As for the support for the Open University, I have made it clear in previous years that the Government's policy is to support the University on a front-end basis with a block grant of about $38 million. They have come back since to ask for more money because the costs of building, and so on, have gone up and we are looking into it. But the main thing is that it would be a front-end support. The cost of running the programme is basically recovered from the students and it comes to about $4,000 per year which I think is affordable by most working adults. So there is no question of whether this grant is going to run out by 1998 or not. If they come out later with programmes that the Government supports, then we may provide more funding front-end, for example, for development of the courseware. But as of now, we have provided money to help them put up a new facility next to Ngee Ann Polytechnic. We have provided the land and this money will also be used to finance the computer facilities, the library, and so on. Hopefully, through this kind of support, we will be able to build up a good institution. Mr Sinnakaruppan also asked about the quality audit of the R&D programmes in universities. I share with him the same concern that there should be proper checks and balances and control to make sure that the money is well spent. As Members are aware, the Government has provided a sum of $100 million to be used for academic R&D. This is not so much the applied side, and not so related to the immediate use. For those with more immediate possibilities, the funding will be through the NSTB. So, basically, there are these two streams of money coming, partly from the academic research fund and partly from the NSTB. For the academic research fund, there is a committee chaired by PS (Education) and comprising members from the Ministry of Finance, NSTB, NUS and NTU to manage and administer the fund. So they are learning how to have proper checks and controls on the use of the fund. And one of the basic concepts is that the research workers will have to justify their needs for the fund, that their research work is worthwhile, that they can do it and that it is worth doing. So they have to compete for money from this fund. One of the problems is that if you have too much money, then it could be mis-spent. So we have to keep our controls quite tight and limit the amount that we spend on R&D. So far the Auditor-General's office has had a look and they are quite happy with the situation. So we will see how it goes from here. Mr Koo Tsai Kee came up with this interesting idea of how to rank our universities. I think it is something that is worth exploring and if there is information on how it can be done, I would like to discuss with him. As a matter of interest, it was brought to my attention recently that in the 1994 issue of the Journal of Systems and Software, which is a New York publication, NUS has been rated the fifth top university worldwide and the top non-US academic institution in terms of publications in the field of systems and software engineering. So I think it goes to show that our universities are getting somewhere. And with the huge amount of resources we are pumping into the universities, I think we should be able to build up the universities into world-class universities. Some years back, we had Lord Dainton from Shelfield University who came to do a study for us and it was he who recommended that we should have two competing universities, NUS and NTU. His own assessment was that our universities were comparable to the redbrick universities in UK, for example, Manchester and Shelfield. So when our students look overseas for education, they may want to bear in mind that our universities are actually very good and it is much less costly for them to study here than overseas. Of course, if they want the overseas exposure, then they have to go there. But do not always assume that foreign universities are better. Mr Sinnakaruppan asked about the international school in Hong Kong. I would like to inform him that the school has been doing well since it was established some years back. It was opened in September 1991 and currently the enrolment is about 620 pupils, of whom more than 70% are citizens of Singapore, or PRs of Singapore. They are still operating from temporary premises but will be moving soon to new facilities which are being built. So far, this school is concentrating only on the primary section. The thinking of the Ministry is that when the children are older, it may be better for them to stay in Singapore in boarding schools or hostels, so that they are more involved in the local situation and better able to look after themselves even whilst their parents are working overseas. So for the Hong Kong International School, the thinking is confined to the primary section, at least for the time being. As for schools in other areas, my position is that we are very short of teachers. So our first responsibility is really to make sure that our system here is functioning properly. Of course, at the same time, we need to support those Singaporeans who are venturing overseas. But the numbers going abroad at the moment are still small and they are scattered all over the place. Even China is a very big country and you have some in Beijing, some in Shandong, some in Suzhou, and so on. The Ministry will get involved when there is a critical mass of students so that we can put up a proper school where there are enough classes for the different levels and it means committing a lot of manpower and other resources. So for the time being, I hope these people will understand that when they go overseas perhaps the practical solution is to enrol their children in some of the international schools. When their children come back, there is no problem for us to fit them back into the school system. We may have to assess at that point in time what is their level of competence and put them in at the appropriate level. If they are going to China, for example, the Chinese language is no worry for them. In fact, the immersion will be very good for them. But they may be concerned whether the children will be able to still follow the Singapore curriculum. 2.15 pm There are some private enterprises which have expressed interest in putting up commercial schools overseas, catering not only to Singaporeans but also to the international community. And if they are interested in the Singapore curriculum, they can approach either the Ministry or the Singapore Teachers Union which has an interest in this area. The STU is prepared to get them in touch with retired school principals and help them with the curriculum and so on. So there are these other possibilities at present. Dr Kanwaljit Soin talked about the SAP schools and asked whether they are still relevant today, especially in view of the fact that they tend to be predominantly of one race. You have to go back a bit and understand the history of it. These schools were set up at a time when more and more parents were going into English education. So the Government decided that it was important that we preserve some of these good schools, the ethos, the discipline, the Chinese environment, the high level of Chinese. There is extensive use of Chinese in these schools. For example, the school song, the way they go about the education system and so on. So it may be a bit too simple to think that it is just a matter of values. Values are common, but the "Chineseness" of these schools cannot be reproduced easily. I think it will be a great loss to Singapore if we were to close down these schools just to avoid the racial segregation. The issue of racial mixing has been discussed before in the House and I do not want to go into it in great detail. But the point is that we live in a multi-racial society and most of our children come from HDB flats. There are, in fact, many opportunities for them to meet and interact. Perhaps what we can do is to provide more opportunities for the SAP school students to interact with the other schools and try and compensate for this factor. But I do not think we should do away with SAP schools for the reasons which she advocated. Sir, I will leave it to my colleagues to answer the other points.