After 20 years, the Government has ended public comparisons of schools. Some cheer the decision, others oppose it. What does it mean for schools and students? 

When 24-year-old Tan Ruiwen failed several subjects at Secondary3, teachers at his school put pressure on him to drop biology – which he did with some reluctance.

“I wanted to drop physics, but they told me to drop biology because it was harder to score in.”

They had his O-level grades in mind, but the school was also concerned about its place in the annual school league tables.

The law undergraduate, who completed Sec 4 in 2004, recalls: “The principal would constantly talk about the school’s ranking at assembly, saying how we wouldn’t be a premier boys school any more if we fell any further.”

If the education system in the past 20 years is remembered for one thing, it is the relentless competition between schools to move up the rankings based on exam results.

Retired principal Paramita Bandara, 70, who headed Ang Mo Kio Secondary in the 1990s, says: “It led to unethical practices like making them drop arts subjects and focusing on pure sciences and maths, so that you’re assured of an A1.”

Other principals say that while banding and awards were meant to help schools, they also constrained them, creating “a cage” of sorts.

Now, schools are being freed.

The Ministry of Education’s (MOE) recent decision to stop publishing such tables grabbed headlines.

It means walking away from a 20-year-old policy of having schools account in public for their exam results.

Today, MOE wants schools and parents to focus on how schools can cater to students of all abilities – academic and otherwise.

Explaining the decision, Education Minister Heng Swee Keat said at his ministry’s Work Plan Seminar this month: “The fact is there is no single yardstick to measure how ‘good’ our schools are.”

Indeed, the aim set out at the start of his tenure as education minister was for every school here to be a good school.

Reasons for ranking

But rewind 20 years, and the MOE was singing a different tune. Back then, it wanted schools and the public to pay more attention to academic outcomes, not less.

Throughout the 1980s, the overriding concern was how to increase the share of each cohort making it to post-secondary education. Of those that entered Primary 1 in 1982, only 62 per cent did so. That rose to 88 per cent for the 1992 cohort, and 93 per cent for the 2000 cohort.

And with information about school performance scarce in a pre-Internet age, the Government decided in 1992 to introduce tables ranking the top 50 secondary schools and junior colleges by their exam scores – an idea borrowed from Britain.

In his National Day Rally that year, then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong drew a comparison to Singapore’s meritocratic system based on open competition.

He said: “Our social, economic and educational systems have all been structured to encourage Singaporeans to compete with one another and to reward those who work hard and do well.”

By giving parents access to information on how each school was performing relative to others, it was thought this would spur schools to compete and help parents make more informed decisions.

Education policy expert Jason Tan of the National Institute of Education (NIE) described this as the marketisation of schools, with the belief then that schools had been stagnating for so long because they had not been exposed to market forces.

The league tables yielded results.

Not only did it allow lesser-known schools which rose up the rankings, like Zhonghua and Xinmin, to attract better students, it also prompted traditional heavyweights who were underperforming to up their game.

Mr Tan Wah Thong, who chaired the board of governors for the Anglo-Chinese Schools (ACS) from 1996 to 2008, says that the initial low ranking of its flagship ACS (Independent) spurred the board and school management to “work very hard to restore some semblance of our true worth”.

So despite mounting criticism during the 1990s and early 2000s of school rankings, the Government resisted pressure to scrap the system, stoutly defending the principle of competition by results.

Course correction

But as an ever-larger share of students passed and even aced national exams, other priorities emerged besides grades.

The Third International Mathematics and Science Study – which was published in 1997, but whose tests lower secondary students sat in 1994 – showed that Singapore topped a list of 41 developed countries in maths and science.

Yet there was also mounting concern that the education system was not preparing students for the world they would have to grapple with, post-graduation.

Retired school principal Belinda Charles says: “Without intending it to be so, ranking and banding had so entered the psyche of parents that increasingly, having a wide cross-section of students to mingle with became the situation to be disdained and not the mark of a good school.”

The competition over grades also led to stress levels that some parents found so hard to bear, they spoke of migrating to avoid putting their children through such a pressure cooker. That was in the 1990s.

In 1997, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong observed during his seminal “Thinking Schools, Learning Nation” speech that many of the ablest students lacked a passion for learning.

He said: “Their knowledge will be fragile, no matter how many As they get, unless they have the desire and aptitude to continue discovering new knowledge well after they leave school.”

In 2003, the Remaking Singapore Committee highlighted the “disproportionate attention” paid to examination results, and pointed to feedback that showed “unhealthy pressure on principals, teachers, students and parents”.

Accepting the committee’s recommendation, the MOE decided to move from ranking to banding in 2004, grouping schools with similar results into 21 bands, with only the top nine published.

Instead of a table listing only academic achievement, the bands were listed alongside the school’s awards in areas like sports and character development. To encourage schools to develop non-academic excellence, a scheme of awards, with different milestones, was introduced.

But while replacing ranking with banding helped ease pressure on schools, the new system opened another can of worms.

Schools started to chase awards, teachers and principals recall, and aping the state’s sporting establishment, some even resorted to importing sports talent from overseas in order to win medals.

Mr Muhammad Imran, a former secondary school teacher, says: “Though intended as a means of showcasing alternative peaks of excellence, award-chasing has become something of a bane to teachers as some programmes and initiatives are carried out solely for the sake of qualifying, and meeting criteria, for awards.”

To win a Sustained Achievement Award for Uniformed Groups, for example, a school would need a minimum share of its students to be members of such co-curricular activities (CCA). It led to some schools closing down CCAs perceived to be of less value, so more students could be channelled to the uniformed groups, Mr Imran says.

NIE’s Dr Tan says: “If you think about it from the viewpoint of providing opportunities for all students, it is at odds with a holistic education.”

Every school a good school

MOE has now scrapped banding, and replaced the scheme of awards with recognition of best practices – be it for character education or staff development.

It hopes the change will prompt parents to judge each school on its strengths.

And the minister wants schools to focus on what they do best, rather than on beating other schools. MOE will spend $55 million over the next five years to help all schools find their own niche areas of excellence – whether it is rugby or environmental education.

The phrase Mr Heng uses to describe this new approach is “student-centric”.

Addressing educators at MOE’s Work Plan Seminar last year, he said: “Many of you have asked for support to be more student-centric, to see to the total development of the person rather than to build up just the academics.

“You also want to see a more collegial and collaborative environment among schools… Our schools and teachers will need time and space to engage in the more demanding type of educating – values and 21st century competencies.”

Underlying this is the recognition that in the 21st century, a different set of smarts is required – which cannot be measured by exams.

Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who was Education Minister from 2003 to 2008, set out the challenge in 2006, in an interview with Newsweek. He said of the United States: “Yours is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. There are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well – like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition.”

Ang Mo Kio Secondary principal Abdul Mannan is among those who are glad to see the end of banding. He says: “Without banding, now principals can rethink what is it that really matters to them and the student. We can try to carve out a particular area we are comfortable with and really add value to the child.”

Paper chase not over

But not everyone is embracing the move away from public comparisons.

Most parents interviewed by The Straits Times after the announcement called it inconvenient – because they were going to choose a school by its exam results anyway.

Principals say shadow rankings will emerge, possibly in chaotic fashion, as parents still want to compare academic results.

In fact, some parents have already come up with an unofficial banding list on the Kiasuparents online forum, compiled from school websites which published their O-level results for this year.

Remembering the pre-1992 days, critics like former ACS board of governors chairman Mr Tan fear that schools will simply slack off and Singapore will lose its edge.

Likening academic banding to exams for schools, Mr Tan says: “If there are no exams, do you think you will still study?”

But their fears may prove unfounded. Despite Integrated Programme schools not being ranked since 2004, most have continued to do well at exams.

At ACS (Independent), where Integrated Programme students take the International Baccalaureate, average scores have gone up despite the absence of ranking or banding.

Mr Ang Wei Neng, a member of the Government Parliamentary Committee for Education, says assessments of schools must remain, though they need not be public.

“If we don’t have a good assessment tool, then we won’t know how the schools are doing,” he said.

Indeed, Mrs Charles says that “MOE has for some time been using internally far more meaningful measures to help schools improve”.

“Wisely, however, they have not released a table of these measures for public consumption, thus pre-empting another round of meaningless competition,” she tells Insight.

But a deeper problem may be that exam results continue to determine, for the vast majority, which school or university one goes to next, and the kind of job and salary one can eventually secure. Until that changes, the emphasis on exam performance will likely remain.

Still, these are small but important steps on a long journey to lessen the focus on grades, and loosen the pressure valve on schools and students.

And it would appear that the Government prefers to refine rather than completely overhaul a system that is not broken and, in fact, continues to draw praise from around the world.

One big question is how ready society is to accept a broader definition of success, and to value talents beyond the academic.

Educators and parents have to work hand in hand to turn that ideal into reality.

Hwa Chong Institution principal Hon Chiew Weng is clear that other skills like innovation, passion and empathy matter, but he also knows that “it takes someone bold to put aside the standard academic assessment and change the yardstick of success”.

This article was first published in The Straits Times. (Copyright 2012)