Singapore overhauls gifted education, tackles privilege and expands access

The programme is undergoing its biggest revamp since its launch, as Prime Minister Lawrence Wong announced on Aug 18 in his maiden National Day Rally speech.

Pupils will no longer be selected through a single, two-stage test in Primary 3, and will not transfer out of their original schools to the nine centres if chosen. 

Instead, they will be selected for special programmes through a variety of measures, including teachers’ observations and one standardised test. These school-based programmes for higher-ability pupils will expand to take in more pupils, and after-school classes will be set up for those who need additional support.

Pupils will also no longer need to be exceptional in all subjects to qualify for higher-ability classes in individual subjects, and can enter and exit the programmes at various points between Primary 4 and 6. 

As the GEP ends in its current form, The Straits Times looks at the programme’s history, its controversies and the reasons for its evolution.

Why was the GEP created, and why was it implemented the way it was?

The roots of the programme, which was launched in 1984 with four schools and 200 schoolchildren, lay in the project that introduced streaming to Singapore’s education system, Dr Chee said.

The project, known as the New Education System, was implemented in 1979 after a report by a team led by first-generation leader and then Education Minister Goh Keng Swee. 

It found that the education system’s one-size-fits-all approach resulted in high levels of “educational wastage” seen in high dropout rates, said Dr Chee, and it recommended streaming to make sure students were studying at a pace appropriate to their abilities, reducing the likelihood that they would leave school.

It also recommended provisions for a spectrum of children with special needs, with special education at one end and gifted education at the other, she said. 

She said: “These two groups of children were seen as two ends of the learner continuum, which needed a differentiated curriculum, pedagogy and assessment in order for them to be engaged, and also to stretch their abilities to reach their potential.”

The recognition of this need sparked the creation of the GEP, which started in 1984 in primary and secondary schools simultaneously, with Rosyth Primary and Raffles Girls’ Primary taking in pupils in Primary 4, and Raffles Institution and Raffles Girls’ Secondary School taking in students in Secondary 1.

The ministry eventually decided on a model where gifted students remained in separate classes in schools with mainstream students, as opposed to systems in countries like Russia, where they were concentrated in specific schools. 

There was an acknowledgement even from the early days that it was undesirable for gifted students to be isolated from others of their age group, said Dr Chee. 

The GEP was also created in part to maximise Singapore’s human capital, said National Institute of Education (NIE) Associate Professor Jason Tan. 

“It was and continues to be an existential concern for the country, given our few natural resources, on how best to develop the capacities and talents of our people,” he said. The gifted programme, in its effort to ensure children reached their full potential, was also created in service of this goal. 

Experimental programme, challenging work

Entering the programme as one of the first cohort was eye-opening, said former GEP pupil Pee Kar Wee, 50.

Mr Pee, who is now director of Mastercard’s payment gateway service, was in the pioneer batch of 100 primary school pupils who joined the programme. 

He, along with 68 other boys and 31 girls, enrolled in the programme in 1984 as Primary 4 pupils at Rosyth Primary and Raffles Girls’ Primary.

He said: “It (the GEP) really threw us into the thick of it. A lot of us started barely passing exams because the papers were much harder.”

This came as a shock to the children and their parents, as their grades had been significantly better before.

The exams were three hours each, and the workload was intense, said Mr Pee. 

But the programme, though experimental, was enriching, he said. 

Mr William Grosse, 65, taught pupils in the Gifted Education Programme for 27 years. PHOTO: MOE

One of his teachers at Rosyth, Mr William Grosse, 65, described his time teaching pupils in the GEP as one of the most exciting periods of his life. 

Mr Grosse, who taught English in the GEP for 27 years from 1985 to 2011, said of his experience teaching the first batch: “They were so precocious, I learnt to be both humble and accepting and to always be prepared for the unexpected.”

To engage them, he adapted various materials and resources, and compiled a library of comics and joke books to spark their interest in the English language. 

He said: “I wanted them to be challenged meaningfully and appropriately. They had the potential and needed work that was rich and deep enough to grapple with.

“It was not just about acceleration but also about providing material that would make them think – like the study of the origins of words, literature and hieroglyphics (an ancient Egyptian writing system).”

Cracks in the system, calls for abolition

In an update to Parliament six years after the programme’s launch, Dr Tay Eng Soon, the Minister of State for Education who had helped launch the programme, said MOE was satisfied with the GEP’s progress. 

He said it had helped pupils broaden their knowledge and develop leadership qualities and thinking skills, and pupils had performed well in national examinations.

However, concerns were emerging about the programme’s exclusivity and perceptions that it promoted a narrow definition of giftedness. 

In the 1989 debate on the President’s Address, then Bedok GRC MP Hong Hai said: “Are we saying, sir, that the other students, the 99 per cent or more who do not make it to the programme, are ungifted or without gifts?”

Thirty years later, at the 2019 Budget debate, Jalan Besar GRC MP Denise Phua called for the GEP’s abolition and named it one of five “sacred cows” in Singapore’s education system that needed to be re-examined. She said the GEP should be abolished and pupils who excelled in specific subjects or learnt differently could be clustered in subject-banded academic programmes that suited them.

Over the years, criticism that the programme privileged the children of parents with more resources also came to the fore. The numbers bore this out.

In 2022, Education Minister Chan Chun Sing told Parliament that about 45 per cent of pupils who joined the GEP over the past five years lived in Housing Board flats.

In education systems around the world, children of higher socio-economic status tend to do better academically, MOE said in a media briefing on the changes to the GEP.

MOE has been tracking the high concentration of pupils from higher socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds in the GEP, but said this was not a primary consideration in its refresh of the programme.

More standardised testing increases how much this effect appears, as parents with greater resources can prepare their children for such tests, it added.

NIE researcher Johannis Auri Aziz, 44, who joined the GEP as a Primary 4 pupil in 1990, said entering the programme was his introduction to socio-economic disparities in education. 

Speaking as an alumnus rather than a researcher, he said: “It was very clear to me that many of the top-performing students were from upper middle class families with educated parents.

“I transferred (to the GEP) from a neighbourhood primary school where I was the one with (socio-economic) class privilege because my mother was a teacher. When I entered the GEP I realised that other people had an even higher leg-up than me.”

Exacerbating this issue is the proliferation of private preparation classes offering to help pupils get into the programme – a phenomenon that has appeared over the last two decades. 

When the programme began, few people knew of its existence, said Dr Johannis. 

He said: “When I did the selection test in Primary 3, not everyone thought it was a big deal. Parents were not gagging to get their kids in.”

MOE’s Dr Chee acknowledged that getting into the GEP has become a “prize” for some parents, which has in turn changed the profile of its pupils. 

She said: “There is now a higher proportion of students attending extra classes to prepare for the GEP selection test. This is concerning to us because it can negatively impact the well-being of children who are ‘hothoused’ just to get into the programme.

“As a result, I think they lose the intrinsic motivation to learn after they feel that they have achieved the goal their parents set for them – which is to get into the GEP.”

Concerns also surfaced over the years that segregating GEP pupils into their own classes had negative effects on their social development and put undue pressure on them.

From 2008, MOE began mixing GEP pupils with their schoolmates in non-academic lessons like music and physical education to help them better integrate.

Consultant Emily Goh, 28, who was in the GEP in Raffles Girls’ Primary, said: “There was a bit of a stigma and a divide between the GEP and mainstream so you tended to cling together as the rest of the school looked at you a bit weirdly.”

Ultimately, the system tended to funnel GEP students together for long periods of their schooling life, which reduced their chances of widening their social circles. 

Information technology consultant Shaun Low, 29, said that in his school, Anglo-Chinese School (Primary), not much attention was paid to whether someone was in the GEP. 

But because he tended to end up in the same classes as his friends from the programme when they moved on to secondary school and the integrated programme at Anglo-Chinese School (Independent), many of his GEP classmates remain his close friends to this day.

While those in the close-knit GEP community supported one another, Dr Chee said there is also a negative side to putting the children together and labelling them “gifted”.

Putting high-achieving pupils together can lead to unhealthy levels of competition and sometimes result in burnout.

There is also the weight of social expectations the label can carry, especially on children as young as 10 to 12, Dr Chee said. 

The future of the programme, and a step forward for Singapore?

The recent changes to the programme seek to alleviate some of these issues, said Dr Chee. 

There will no longer be a single point of entry through a standardised test, which will reduce the incentive to prepare children to get into the programme, she said. 

Not concentrating the pupils in specific classes and allowing them to remain in their original schools will also help them learn to work better with their peers, a crucial skill for their adult lives, she added. 

The changes also better recognise that giftedness develops differently in every pupil, allowing pupils to enter the programme at different levels for different subjects, Dr Chee said. 

These changes are possible now because the education system has the capacity in terms of teachers and resources to make programmes available to more pupils, she said. 

Equity has long been an issue in public perceptions of the GEP, said NIE’s Prof Tan, pointing to its smaller class sizes and various enrichment programmes, which in the past were not available to mainstream students. 

The changes attempt to square the education system’s competing priorities of providing for gifted children’s specialised needs with distributing resources equitably, he added.

Discontinuing the current form of the programme is a significant step forward, and a signal that Singapore is not afraid to challenge longstanding frameworks to better address evolving social realities, said executive director Clarence Ching of social mobility charity Access Singapore. 

According to surveys conducted by the charity, many feel that Singapore has become more unequal over the last decade, and believe that brand-name schools and different neighbourhoods offer different opportunities to individuals. 

“Democratising access to gifted education is a strong first step in demonstrating our broader commitment to supporting and ensuring more individuals can thrive, regardless of their circumstance or background,” he said. 

However, the devil is in the detail in how the changes will be implemented, said Ms Phua. She told The Straits Times: “If not done well, the system might revert to the old mindset of creating an ‘elite’ stream within every school because parents or students will prep themselves to be in the GEP stream.”

Ms Chong said she is concerned that the new system may not feature the small-classroom setting and stable learning environment which were tolerant of and nurturing to many of her peers, who would have been considered ill-behaved in a mainstream classroom.

But she is cautiously optimistic about the changes, she said, adding that they are responsive to the fact that the programme’s demographics have changed – and more privileged children are entering it, muddying its original mission. 

She said of opportunities the GEP exposed her to: “I really wish this for every kid in the education system, not just higher-ability kids.”

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Source: The Straits Times © SPH Media Limited. Permission required for reproduction.