Singapore ranked 5th in education report by Pearson

1. Report by Pearson on educational systems
http://thelearningcurve.pearson.com/the-report/executive-summary

The Singapore educational system is ranked 5th in the world in a recent report by Pearson (Nov 2012).

Strong relationships are few between education inputs and outputs. Experts point out that simply pouring resources into a system is not enough: far more important are the processes which use these resources. 

A global index can help highlight educational strengths and weaknesses - the Global Index of Cognitive Skills and Educational Attainment. Covering 40 countries, it is based on results in a variety of international tests of cognitive skills as well as measures of literacy and graduation rates. The top performers in the Index are Finland and South Korea. Closer examination, shows that both countries develop high-quality teachers, value accountability and have a moral mission that underlies education efforts.

Five lessons for education policymakers

• There are no magic bullets: The small number of correlations found in the study shows the poverty of simplistic solutions. Throwing money at education by itself rarely produces results, and individual changes to education systems, however sensible, rarely do much on their own. Education requires long-term, coherent and focussed system-wide attention to achieve improvement.
• Respect teachers: Good teachers are essential to high-quality education. Finding and retaining them is not necessarily a question of high pay. Instead, teachers need to be treated as the valuable professionals they are, not as technicians in a huge, educational machine.
• Culture can be changed: The cultural assumptions and values surrounding an education system do more to support or undermine it than the system can do on its own. Using the positive elements of this culture and, where necessary, seeking to change the negative ones, are important to promoting successful outcomes.
• Parents are neither impediments to nor saviours of education: Parents want their children to have a good education; pressure from them for change should not be seen as a sign of hostility but as an indication of something possibly amiss in provision. On the other hand, parental input and choice do not constitute a panacea. Education systems should strive to keep parents informed and work with them.
• Educate for the future, not just the present: Many of today’s job titles, and the skills needed to fill them, simply did not exist 20 years ago. Education systems need to consider what skills today’s students will need in future and teach accordingly.

Comparative tests such as Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) manifest a growing emphasis on benchmarking the performance of different systems and on understanding what sets apart the highest achievers.

PISA has fundamentally challenged the idea that education should be valued largely on the volume of spending and other inputs, and the premise that more investment is always better. “The shift from inputs to outcomes [as the focus of study] has been a significant impact” of the tests, he says.

The ultimate hope is to uncover, where possible, any interventions which might have a positive effect not only on the development of cognitive skills and scholastic achievement.

Experts interviewed for this study repeatedly point to several of these other factors which are essential in promoting teacher quality:

• Attracting the best people to the profession: Getting good teachers begins with recruiting talented individuals. Finland and South Korea – two perennially cited examples of education success and the top countries in our Index – obtain their annual teacher intake from the top 10% and 5% of graduating students respectively. The key to such success is the status in which teaching is held culturally. Here money can have some effect, not just as a simple inducement but as a signal of status. The South Korean government uses high levels of teacher pay in this way both to compensate for large class sizes and to indicate the importance it accords to the profession.

• Providing the right training: The training of these new recruits has to be appropriate to the conditions in which they will work. This varies by country. The Finnish system, for example, benefits from teachers having graduate degrees. As Mr Cappon notes, “teachers need to be lifelong learners themselves. You can’t inculcate a love of learning unless you live it.” Effective professional development needs to address not just upgrading the knowledge of teachers – providing, for example, a better understanding of new technology and teaching strategies – but also allow them to advance along their career path into more senior positions where relevant.

• Treating teachers like professionals: Consistent with the need to promote the status of teaching is its treatment as a profession. Mr Ratteree notes that “things like continual professional development and professional autonomy can be powerful incentives for better learning outcomes.” Mr Cappon agrees: “Teachers must be seen as professionals who exercise judgement, not just technicians.”

• Implementing clear goals and effective oversight, and then letting teachers get on with it: Professors Hanushek and Woessmann both point to this combination of accountability and independence as consistently correlated with improved outcomes. Professor Schleicher agrees. High-performing school systems, he says, combine demanding standards, low tolerance of failure, and clear articulation of expectations with “a lot of professional responsibility within a collaborative work organization at the front line,” for both teachers and schools.

Singapore’s Professor Lee explains that “of today’s job titles compared to those of 1995, many are very new; the skills are very new. We anticipate that evolution will be fast into the future.” For over a decade, his country’s Ministry of Education has engaged in future scanning to identify the likely skills needed in the coming years, and adjusted its offerings to students accordingly. More important, since 1997, says Professor Lee, Singapore has shifted away from teaching rote knowledge to a firm foundation in the basics of maths, science, and literacy combined with an inculcation of how to understand and apply information. “We feel it contributes toward the students acquiring knowledge and skills of cognition and creativity attributes which are very important in the 21st century landscape.”

Shanghai students finished first in the latest PISA tests, but China is also shifting toward a much greater emphasis on creativity. South Korean schools, meanwhile, are now being encouraged to develop "creativity, character and collaboration".

The two systems of South Korea and Finland do share some important aspects when examined closely. “When you look at both, you find nothing in common at first,” says Professor Schleicher, “but then find they are very similar in outlook.” One element of this is the importance assigned to teaching and the efforts put into teacher recruitment and training. As discussed above, the practices of the two countries differ markedly, but the status which teaching achieves and the resultant high quality of instruction are similar. Professor Schleicher adds that both systems also have a high level of ambition for students and a strong sense of accountability, but again these are “articulated differently. In South Korea, accountability is exam driven; in Finland, it is peer accountability, but the impact is very similar.”

The immediate cause of this drive has disappeared, but it has helped inculcate a lasting ethic of education which only strengthened the more widespread attitude in Asia that learning is a moral duty to the family and society as well as a necessary means of individual advancement.

In Finland, the ethos is different but no less powerful. As Mr Mackay explains, that country has made “a commitment as a nation to invest in learning as a way of lifting its commitment to equity. They wish to lift the learning of all people: it is about a moral purpose that comes from both a deeper cultural level and a commitment at a political-social level.” In other words, education is seen as an act of social justice.

Both of these moral purposes can cause difficulties in different ways. The high expectations and pressure mean that studies regularly find South Korean teenagers to be the least happy in the OECD. In Finland, the egalitarian system seems less effective at helping highly talented students to perform to the best of their ability than at making sure average results are high. Nevertheless, the power of these attitudes in shaping cultural norms and political decisions in ways that help education attainment overall are undeniable.