Years later, after I co-founded EveryChild.SG, a non-profit started by a group of concerned Singaporean parents, I realised that this Singlish dictum is applicable not only to foreign affairs, but education too. EveryChild.SG keeps getting asked why we’re banging on about the urgency of education reform when our economy is apparently doing great, our students are topping the PISA rankings, and every developing country wants to learn from Singapore’s “world-class” education system. 

Well, because we’ve sold that koyok so well that we’ve ended up buying it ourselves.

The truth is that our PISA rankings are propped up by a nearly S$2bn a year private tuition industry, and the system is costing us enormously in youth mental health, teacher burnout, parental stress, fractured parent-adolescent relationships, mothers’ careers, and declining fertility rates, just to name a few. And is anyone even measuring if our children are emerging from this system with the skillsets needed for the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the broader fourth industrial revolution? 

Before we examine why the Ministry of Education (MOE) has had trouble developing a “future-ready” education—one that will nurture so-called 21st Century Competencies (21CC, more below) in our kids—and the steps that we can together take to do so now, we need to first be clear-eyed about what ails us. We need to undress that koyok.

By contrast, Singapore government primary schools typically have 30 students per class in Primary 1 and 2, which then jumps to 40 from Primary 3 to 6, double the norm for rich countries. A class size of 40 will impact the quality of teaching, no matter how good the teacher is. It hinders personalised instruction, differentiated learning, and meaningful support for students with learning needs. Student-teacher and student-peer interactions are limited. This low quality of teaching—which is not the fault of teachers—combined with the strong emphasis on grades, drives parents to seek external tuition to support their child’s learning. 

The next set of challenges revolve around our outdated curriculum and key performance indicators (KPIs). Beyond the first two years of primary school, it is quickly made clear to students that they are being judged on their academic performance. The ultimate KPI for all in the system—students, teachers, parents, school—is understood to be the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE). But the PSLE’s curriculum and format is not aligned with the MOE’s own 21CC framework, and instead focuses on skillsets that are already out of date.

Teachers, however, are driven by the KPI of PSLE to “teach to the test”, encouraging memorisation and repetitive practice. The unrelenting focus on grades in the years leading up to the PSLE—by parents, school teachers, tuition teachers, friends, the random uncle in the lift—creates a competitive, risk-averse and failure-averse environment. Teachers have been known to resort to hierarchy and fear to control large classrooms and try to keep them focused on the content they are delivering at a punishing pace.

Such an environment is the antithesis of the psychological safety and inclusion required to nurture 21CC. Unsurprisingly, the attainment of 21CC is neither systematically measured nor emphasised in daily teaching. To truly nurture 21CC in students, teachers must model these values consistently, throughout the day, and not just in short bursts. It requires time and space for high quality teacher-student interactions. Children follow what we do, not what we say.

Importantly, this intense focus on academic achievement from a young age adversely affects children’s self-esteem, mental health, holistic development and future resilience. 

It also strains parent-child relationships at the crucial pre-adolescent age. That’s when a parent’s role should naturally evolve from a more directive to a more mentoring one. Instead, parents feel compelled to micro-manage (and sometimes scold or yell at) their children through hours of homework, revision and tuition. At the point when children should be developing a greater sense of independence, self-esteem and self-efficacy, they instead receive a clear message that parental love and their future worth to society are dependent on their grades.

Meanwhile, parents, ironically, are blamed for a competitive game they’re forced to play. There is a pervasive belief, encouraged by the government, that it is up to them to reduce this pressure in our system. This is misguided. The pressure is self-perpetuating, out of individual control, and likely to get worse as wealth and income inequality worsen further.

Game theory helps explain why. Most humans respond rationally to the systems and incentives in which they are immersed. In the case of PSLE, students are stack-ranked by their grades (or now, levels/bands) and then allocated to secondary schools, starting from the highest ranked students. This induces a zero-sum competitive game, where parents are forced into intense competition so their children don’t end up at the bottom of a national stack-ranking exercise that will determine educational opportunities for the next four to six years.

Ideally we would have a fixed national standard for what students should have learnt by the end of primary school. In reality, “studying enough” for PSLE is always an upward moving target, because a student’s final position in this ranking depends on how many other students they can beat. In “Good Meritocracy, Bad Meritocracy”, economist Donald Low depicted the problems with prizing relative position over absolute performance. “[E]veryone will divert more resources and time from non-positional goods (e.g., leisure time, family time) to compete for what is now a positional good…This kind of ‘arms race’ phenomenon characterises many parts of the meritocratic system practised in Singapore. For instance, it ails our education system where students are graded on a curve, and it explains why parents probably spend much more on private tuition than what is collectively optimal.”

For every child pushed to forego their interests and free play to attend more tuition, a child whose parents are trying to take a more balanced approach will fall to a lower spot in the stack-ranking, impacting their self-esteem. There is nothing individual parents can do to help their children escape this compulsory competitive game. 

This intense academic pressure also impacts parents’, especially mothers’, careers and finances, as they struggle to support their children through hours of academic drilling, peaking in Primary 5 and 6. (Conversations with current and prospective parents have convinced us at EveryChild.SG that this extremely stressful rite of passage is one of the key, albeit understudied, drivers of our declining fertility rates.) Tuition is no longer seen as optional in this zero-sum competitive game. I’ve seen charities scrambling to figure out how to get good quality tuition—consistent, low ratio and aligned to the PSLE syllabus—for the low-income families they support, as ad-hoc, volunteer-driven academic support is no longer considered good enough.

Next, there is a dire shortage of support professionals in schools for students with learning needs and mental health concerns. The few professionals, like school counselors and Special Educational Needs Officers (SENO), are overworked and often underqualified. RICE’s recent article on students not being able to trust their school counselors was unfortunately not a new revelation. This lack of resources and expertise often leads to undiagnosed and/or unsupported mental health and learning needs in schools. Parents are compelled to seek expensive private tuition and therapy.

The above combination of factors is having a profound impact on our youths’ mental health. One in three young people in Singapore report internalising mental health symptoms such as sadness, anxiety, and loneliness. Those aged 14 to 16 exhibit more severe symptoms. Meanwhile, 12 percent of adolescents aged 10 to 18—almost one in eight of them—meet the full diagnostic criteria for at least one mental health disorder. And parents weren’t able to adequately identify them. Nearly one in three young people aged 15 to 35 reported severe or extremely severe symptoms of depression, anxiety, or stress. On average, one child (age 10-19) dies by suicide in Singapore every ten days. 

Yet MOE remains hesitant to accept the need for fundamental system-level policy changes, like moving away from PSLE as the main KPI of primary school education. It has thus not been able to shift the dominant competitive mindset in our schools and parenting. Instead, the ministry focuses on encouraging parents, teachers and schools to change their behaviour and put less pressure on students, using guides (e.g. for parent support groups to support student mental health), trainings, and anecdotal success stories. It deflects calls for systemic change through consultation and engagement sessions, which usually conclude (again) by calling for changes in citizen mindsets and behaviour.

Unfortunately, this approach will not work if education remains a competitive game. Neither will tinkering with the rules—by removing mid-year exams or grading PSLE in bands, for example—while keeping the game essentially intact. 

Manpower planning seems to be another challenge for MOE. It appears reticent to reduce class sizes because of worries over attracting/retaining sufficient good quality teachers to do so. It is also hesitant to start using qualified clinical psychologists to provide mental health support in schools, or licensed allied health professionals (e.g. occupational therapists and speech therapists) to provide learning needs support in schools, when most other developed countries consider these professionals integral to their school systems. 

However, working around manpower constraints and planning manpower ramp-ups, while challenging, are not new to Singapore, and are ongoing in other parts of the economy to meet future economic and social needs. There certainly are ways for MOE to tackle its manpower challenges without compromising quality, as depicted below.

MOE is unable to effectively address these problems partly because it currently lacks sufficient senior and empowered career policy-makers, based on our comprehensive analysis of their senior staff in January 2023. To those of us who have worked with MOE in our professional capacity, what is striking is the large number of practising professionals, such as senior teachers, principals, and educational psychologists, holding veto power over policy impacting the primary school system. While they’re undoubtedly good at their in-school jobs, it’s unfair to expect them to craft national-level policy without sufficient years of training, experience and guidance on how to do so.

We do not have mostly senior doctors running health policy in the Ministry of Health (MOH), at least not in the past decade, or mostly senior pilots running aviation policy at the Ministry of Transport. In general, policy-making, and especially large-scale, systems-level revamps are not what practitioners are trained for, or adept at. 

MOE has thus developed an internal culture of blaming the behaviour of parents for perpetuating stress and competition, without seriously examining policy solutions that go beyond minor tweaks. Rarely in Singapore are large-scale policy failures blamed on the behaviour of citizens. Rather, the government (largely) strives to design policy that works with, not against, human psychology to succeed.

In its current form, MOE is organisationally unlikely to be able to fix the shortcomings in our education system. It will require political will from the Cabinet to reorganise MOE first, before MOE is capable of updating the education system.

Indeed, Singapore has a history of achieving success once we commit to a goal as a national priority. Our proactive response to an ageing population offers a valuable model to learn from. Over a decade ago, a series of high-level government taskforces culminated in the establishment of the Ageing Planning Office (APO) within MOH. These efforts brought together cross-sectoral expertise to develop and implement comprehensive strategies for an ageing society, leading to significant advancements in healthcare services, community support, and financial schemes tailored to the elderly. While there is still a lot of work to be done, making it a national priority helped us reframe our whole-of-society approach to ageing.

But before we can suggest specific measures, we should articulate a broad philosophical approach to education. What does “future-ready” mean in one of the wealthiest nations in the world? How should we, as a country, invest in our future?

At EveryChild.SG, we believe that a modern primary education system must unlock every child’s potential. Regardless of socio-economic status, learning needs, or family situation, every student should leave school having recognised and honed their own strengths. The system must also be designed to deliberately develop in children those aforementioned 21st Century Competencies (21CC)—having a growth mindset, knowing how to take calculated risks, thinking out of the box, asking the right questions, creativity, collaboration, empathy, communication, and confidence.

In an increasingly unpredictable and fast-changing world, these 21CC are essential for preparing future generations to navigate complex challenges. The rise of social media and online echo chambers has increased political polarisation, facilitated the spread of misinformation, and fostered divisive populist ideologies. Without the ability to critically evaluate information, engage in respectful dialogue, and seek common ground, societies risk becoming even more fractured.

Finally, a future-ready education system must, as a basic tenet, protect every individual’s mental health—children, parents, and teachers alike. We must lower rates of bullying, anxiety, depression, and self-harm among children, while fostering better relationships between parents and children to anchor them through the turbulence of adolescence and the challenges of widespread social media use.

The first is to reduce stress in the system. This can be done by making the PSLE optional, only for those who want to compete for a handful of academically selective schools. To complement this, we must ensure that all students have a through-train from their primary school to a partner secondary school, using subject-based banding to ensure a smooth transition.

We can then replace the competitive, high-stakes exams with more regular, bite-sized assessments that gauge progress against national standards, without stack-ranking students. Tools like Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) testing can track students’ academic progress at regular intervals and provide a clear trajectory of learning, without pitting them against each other. There should also be more assessments in real-life formats like discussions, group work and projects.

The second feature is to reduce class sizes. We should limit primary school class sizes to a maximum of 25 students to enable differentiated teaching, personalised learning, stronger teacher-student relationships, and the opportunity to nurture 21CC.

The third is better support for learning and mental health needs. Singapore should be providing not just more counselors, but should invest more in their training, alongside senior learning support professionals, licensed occupational and speech therapists, and clinical psychologists. These professionals can support teachers, who in turn can support the growing mental health and learning needs in their classrooms. 

The last feature is to implement a centralised and inclusive admissions system. We can create a more equitable system by, for instance, eliminating practices like alumni priority and volunteering advantages.

Updating our primary education system for the 21st century is something we all need to care deeply about. Our education system shapes the future generation of workers, adults and parents, who will in turn have to support an ageing population in a complex world. In the coming years and decades, how we treat our children will determine Singapore’s future. We can’t afford to fail.

Pooja Bhandari is the founder of EveryChild.SG, a non-profit working towards a loving and nurturing upbringing for every child in Singapore through research, public education and advocacy. She also consults on impact and special projects for AWWA, a large multi-service charity. Prior to that, Pooja spent six years at the Ministry of Social and Family Development, heading policy on disability early intervention for children, and then manpower planning for the social service sector.

Letters in response to this piece can be sent to sudhir@jom.media. All will be considered for publication on our “Letters to the editor” page.

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