05 July 2020

The Ministry of Education has stated that every secondary school student will receive a personal laptop or tablet by next year.

Thus, no student will be left behind in the push toward digitization as well as home-based learning, and social mobility will be kept alive. Each student will have equal opportunity to do well, regardless of his or her starting point.

Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who is also the Coordinating Minister for Social Policies, said that social mobility is an integral part of Singapore’s identity.

Indeed, every successful country has found that it gets more difficult to sustain social mobility with time. The gap widens when parents with higher education or who have become better off invest more in their children, moving them further ahead of the rest.

In this respect, Mr Tharman said the Government and its partners have been working to equalise opportunities for Singaporeans.

The Ministry of Education has also been allocating extra resources to schools for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. They will be given more support in the coming years, with the hiring of more teachers, allied educators, student welfare officers and teacher-counsellors.

These efforts complement the ministry’s Uplift (Uplifting Pupils in Life and Inspiring Families Taskforce) programme, in which schools and the community collaborate to support students from disadvantaged families. The additional resources thus pooled together will help students to go as far as they can through the full subject-based banding system in secondary schools, which allows students to take subjects at varying levels of difficulty based on their strengths.

03 July 2020

An international panel of academics and industry representatives concluded some time back that university rankings are not very useful.

This view is shared by Singapore’s Education Minister Ong Ye Kung, who said: “The current ranking system is actually rather crude and one-size-fits-all, and actually not that relevant compared with what we want to achieve.”

This was the consensus reached by the International Academic Advisory Panel, which was assembled some time back to advise Singapore’s Education Ministry on university trends.

Mr Ong said that each of Singapore’s six autonomous universities has its own focus, and social and economic mission.

Nonetheless, global rankings, if taken in the right spirit, can still provide a gauge as to where an institution stands, and serve as an indicator of progress over time.

In determining the universities’ rung on the ladder, publications such as Times Higher Education and Quacquarelli Symonds use a mix of performance indicators that assess their abilities in research, teaching, employability and international outlook.

However, these metrics have been criticised for focusing too heavily on research prowess, which privileges large broad-based universities.

“If you look at student-to-faculty ratio, it just measures the number of warm bodies but doesn’t study in detail the quality of teaching and learning. Environmental factors that are hard to measure are not captured,” said NUS President Tan Eng Chye, who named initiatives that rankings do not account for, like residential colleges and overseas colleges where NUS students learn the ropes of entrepreneurship.

02 July 2020

Two second-year Institute of Technical Education students have emerged winners in the Social Innovation Relay 2020, a global social innovation competition that challenges youths to develop innovative business concepts that address social needs.

The ITE contestants who represented Singapore were Mr Arthur Chong, 19, and Mr Ernest Antonio Ching, 18. They had earlier qualified by beating nine other teams from schools such as Raffles Institution and Dunman High School in the final national leg of the competition late last month.

The ITE students came up with the idea of a social enterprise to train and place youth with autism in jobs that matched their skills. Mentors would be assigned to coach the youth on handling work situations for up to a year. The pair also developed a prototype of a chat support application.

Now that the competition is over, the they might look into working with Inclus on the use of the app.

The students gave credit to their mentors, ITE lecturer Ismadi Suhadi and cyber security risk manager Adeline Chan, for guidance on areas for improvement. Ms Chan is from the non-profit organisation Junior Achievement Singapore, which organises the local competition.

29 June 2020

The labour market is under considerable strain this year, with businesses are postponing recruitment of fresh candidates.

Out of 266 firms recently polled by a local recruitment and employment agency, 38 per cent of companies expect headcount to fall in the July to September quarter, while 46 per cent expect no change and 5 per cent are unsure.

However, ManpowerGroup Singapore country manager Linda Teo said that
“Amid the bleak hiring climate, job seekers can still find pockets of opportunities, especially in the public administration and education sector.”

Preliminary data from the Manpower Ministry released in April showed that total employment in Singapore plunged by 19,900 in the first quarter.

Singapore university graduates are indeed having trouble finding employment that either match their expectations or are relevant to their freshly obtained degree.

A uptick in lack of gainful employment among the young has serious consequences for Singapore. Research has shown that young people who are unemployed experience a negative impact on their well-being. A slower start in life would also result in lower lifetime earnings and overall reduced opportunities in life.

The situation in Singapore is not anywhere as dire as that in other parts of the developed world, but it nonetheless needs to be addressed. That there is even an acronym — NEET (not in education, employment or training) — for this group of young people, shows how serious the problem is.

27 June 2020

Fresh law graduates will soon be given more traineeship opportunities in the legal sector.

The Ministry of Law and Workforce Singapore have stated that they will collaborate with the Law Society of Singapore to encourage law practices in participating in the SGUnited Traineeships programme.

The Government will create 21,000 places for polytechnic, Institute of Technical Education and university graduates under this programme. Each stint will last up to 12 months, and trainees will get a monthly allowance.

Traineeship opportunities can include practice training contracts for law graduates, and opportunities in roles such as paralegals, legal secretaries and legal technologists.

The Law Society of Singapore provides a wide range of training programmes. Such programmes cover practice management matters such as ethics, risk management and anti-money laundering.

26 June 2020

In the latest university rankings published by education research consultancy firm Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), the National University of Singapore held on to its top spot in Asia and was placed 11th worldwide.

Mr Ben Sowter, director of research at QS, said: “Last year, according to the World Economic Forum, Singapore overtook the United States to become the world’s most competitive economy. The local (Singapore) universities have contributed to such extraordinary achievement by boosting the innovation capability of the city state and by educating a large proportion of its highly skilled workforce.”

In the latest QS ranking, all three ranked Singapore universities improved in the citation per faculty indicator, but all three of them also dropped significantly in the indicator that measures the number of international students attending them.

There have been calls to pause university rankings in light of the global human malware situation.

The editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, Mr Holden Thorp, who previously held top leadership positions at American research universities, recently argued: “This is not a time for institutions to be using precious resources to chase these (ranking) numbers.” Rather, he said, universities need to support struggling students and academics.

Associate Professor Jason Tan of the National Institute of Education agreed that companies that produce such rankings need to relook the usefulness of the league tables and the criteria they use.