Our meritocratic education system has served as a key enabler of social mobility, with standardised testing, affordable education fees, and numerous grants for lower income families providing equal opportunities for students from any background to succeed based on their individual abilities and achievements.
This system has uplifted many families over the past few decades. However, as Education Minister Ong Ye Kung has pointed out, families who benefited from meritocracy have spared no effort in investing in their children, such as enrolling them in enrichment classes from a young age to give them a head start.
These are privileges that lower income families cannot afford, and the result is that children from affluent families have a greater chance to achieve better grades and enter more “elite” schools.
A recent report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development pointed out that 46 per cent of disadvantaged students in Singapore attended disadvantaged schools, up from 41 per cent in 2009.
Hence, meritocracy seems to have paradoxically resulted in “systemic unfairness”, with a growing upper-middle class leading to diminishing opportunities for poorer students, exacerbating inequality in Singapore.
What can be done to ensure that education remains an effective social leveller?
Here, I propose three ways to remodel our education system.
First, to rethink priority admissions during the Primary 1 registration process; second, to make pre-school education compulsory and on an opt-out basis; and third, to move away from a narrow focus on academic merit and assess students more holistically.
RETHINKING PRIORITY ADMISSIONS
To ensure a better mix of students in schools, starting from this year, a fifth of places in secondary schools will be reserved for students not from affiliated primary schools.
But more can be done at an earlier level.
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Currently, during the Primary 1 registration process, children of alumni, parent volunteers, and community leaders are given priority during phases 2A(1), 2A(2) and 2B.
This seems antithetical to the ethos of meritocracy providing equal opportunities, as students are admitted based on inherited advantages.
Analysis of admissions data also finds that students who benefit from priority admissions concentrate within a narrow band of popular schools, and less privileged students either self-select into less popular schools or are turned away from these popular schools.
These less privileged students are likely to be children of parents who did not have the fortune of studying in those schools or have to juggle different jobs and do not have the time to volunteer.
Many of these popular schools tend to be schools affiliated to the more “elite” schools at the secondary level, which have more resources. Hence, priority admissions have knock-on effects that could perpetuate inequality from the starting point of our education system.
While scrapping this system of priority admissions entirely would be the most effective move, schools do benefit from support and donations from their alumni networks, which can help to fund beneficial extracurricular activities for their students.
Hence, I suggest progressively limiting the number of vacancies for priority admissions per year until a suitable threshold like one class size, and keeping the majority of places for phase 2C, which is open to all.
This would ensure a more equitable system and more diversified school environments, providing the equality of opportunities that meritocracy is supposed to deliver.
COMPULSORY PRE-SCHOOL EDUCATION
By age 6, close to 99 per cent of Singaporean children were registered in pre-schools. Yet, while there are some families who prefer to home-school their children, there are low-income
families that do not have the means or are not aware of the benefits of pre-school education in helping their children start off in primary school on a similar level as other children.
Pre-school education should thus be made compulsory and with generous grants for low-income children.
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If parents wish to home-school their children, they can apply to do so on an opt-out basis. While this may seem overly paternalistic, research has shown that universal pre-school programmes help low-income children substantially in the long term, ensuring they have an equal chance at social mobility as other children.
To fund the increases in spending necessary for this programme, the government can allocate some funds away from the expenditure on universities, which is currently the highest among all educational institutes.
Spending on higher education benefits the relatively advantaged more than the disadvantaged and exacerbates intergenerational inequalities, hence if social mobility in the education system is a concern, funding pre-school education for low-income children should be a bigger priority.
EXPANDING “MERIT”
The recent revamp of the PSLE scoring system is a good move away from an overemphasis on academic results. However, there is still the underlying mindset that academic achievement is all that matters, as seen by how parents have put together their own lists of PSLE top scorers.
What is needed to change this mindset are more concrete examples of how non-academic achievements are valued.
For example, secondary schools, junior colleges and universities can expand their quotas for students entering via aptitude-based admissions.
The Public Service Commission, which offers prestigious scholarships, has stated that it will cast its net wider to take in Singaporeans from all backgrounds, and it can go further by reserving an undefined quota for students who demonstrate non-academic excellence, come from “non-elite” schools, or have shown perseverance in the face of great adversity.
By leaving this quota undefined, it gives the selection committee room to not compromise on quality, but leaving the possibility open for students who are not so academically inclined to obtain the scholarship, incentivising them to work hard.
Meritocracy has worked well for our country, and there is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater and revamp our meritocratic education system entirely.
Mr Ong is right when he says that “there is no contradiction between meritocracy and fairness”.
But to ensure that our education system remains an effective social leveller, bold policies are needed to ensure our children start on a truly level playing field and to broaden our definition of “merit” beyond academic achievements.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Isaac Neo Yi Chong is a Year 4 undergraduate at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. This is a runner-up entry of an essay competition for NUS students and alumni that is held in conjunction with NUS’ U@live forum on the topic “Education – Still a Social Leveller?” Education Minister Ong Ye Kung was a key panelist at the forum on March 27.
