When it comes to education systems, Singapore’s is widely perceived as one of the best in the world. And it would seem able to back that reputation up.

The country, with a population of just under six million, is consistently one of the highest-performing in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) tables, once again topping the boards for science, reading and maths in the most recent edition (2022).

Little wonder, then, that there is a long - and growing - history of educators from around the world looking to learn from the country. And that includes the UK.

Back in 2007, Andrew Adonis, then parliamentary under-secretary for schools and learners, spoke to his counterpart in Singapore, Tharman Shanmugaratnam (now president of the country), about creating a programme to send education leaders in both directions and see what they could take back to their own systems.

And so the Building Educational Bridges programme was born in 2008, jointly funded by the Department for Education and the British Council, and designed by Susan Douglas, a senior schools adviser to the latter, as well as CEO of the Eden Academy Trust. Exchanges have run every year since, barring the two years of Covid-19 shutdown.

There have been some high-profile attempts at importing Singaporean approaches to England since, most notably in maths, but these are not the only things to come out of the programme - and importing Singapore methods is not what the programme was designed to focus upon.

Douglas is keen to make it clear that there has never been an objective to clumsily copy and paste Singaporean approaches into English schools.

“It’s problematic to pick something up from another country, dump it in Bradford and think ‘Yeah, that’ll work’,” she says.

Instead, the programme is designed to help leaders reflect on their own systems and be inspired to look at new ways of doing things within that context.

So, what are the key bits of the Singaporean system that provide the most interesting stimulus for thinking in England and in other countries, too?

1. The status of education and teachers

Education has a different status in Singapore from many other systems around the world, says Douglas. Valuing education is “part of the national narrative”, she explains.

In 1965, when Singapore gained independence, half of the population was illiterate “but it had no natural resources at all, and knowing it needed to survive, to find its place within the Malay Peninsula and wider south-east Asia, their people were their most important assets”, she says. “So education became absolutely the most important thing.”

She adds: “It is a culture built around the value of education. It’s a common principle that is shared with other high-performing systems, like South Korea and Ontario, that there is a very deliberate curation of the value of education at a policy level.”

This translates to the structure of its recruitment and retention approach.

There is a three-pathway system into the profession: a teaching track (where staff stay in the classroom to become expert teachers and mentors), a subject specialist track (where they focus on developing expertise in their curriculum area) and a leadership track.

Only the top 20 per cent of graduates are accepted on to training programmes, which are funded by the government - but fees must be repaid if you leave within a certain amount of time - and the chosen pathway is identified early in an educator’s career, with each equally valued in the system.

“So if you are a master teacher in science, you are held in the same level of esteem and probably paid the same as if you were a school leader,” Douglas explains, “which means that they’re able to keep some of their best teachers in the classroom.”

Warren Carratt, CEO of the Nexus Multi Academy Trust, was a member of the cohort that visited Singapore in January 2024. He believes there would need to be a fundamental culture shift here to make this possible.

He says: “Taking lessons away from Singapore on recruitment and retention is hard because the importance of teaching is interwoven with the Singaporean society, its culture, its systems, its processes.

“You have to applaud the Singaporean system for elevating the teaching profession so effectively. It’s almost like an inverse of what we’ve had in the UK over the past few decades.

“The Singapore system, for example, ensures those that want to be teachers have a really good understanding of the job before they start teaching.

“Doing a significant placement in school before you begin training is something anybody wanting to teach in Singapore has to commit to - and that impacts on teacher retention levels - particularly in the first few years of teaching.”

Craig Lee, primary director of the Bradford Diocesan Academies Trust, visited Singapore in the spring of 2023 and was inspired by the way that the Singaporean government “cascaded its vision and expectations for education to the universities and schools of education, who then delivered this to school staff, who in turn brought these changes into the pedagogy within their schools”.

“I reflected that our system can be disjointed, as all our providers are separate entities with different strategic visions,” he says. “So I asked myself how I could align the trust vision and future developments to the school development plans and the CPD offer to our staff, both from internal and external providers, and how could we measure this for its impact on staff and pupils in both a qualitative and quantitative way.”

One of the areas he considered was the use of National Professional Qualifications (NPQs), and how “these courses and their participants are now accountable for the impact measures in their schools and the trust”.

“One example was the NPQ in leading primary maths,” he explains. “The trust needed both its maths results and provision to improve so we enrolled our schools on to the NPQLPM, with one leader from each school partaking in the course on the school’s behalf.”

He adds: “This has led to consistent training accessed by all schools, improved collaboration, school-to-school challenge and working partnerships.

“Our NPQLPM delivery is now aligned with their own trust maths professional learning community (network) and has given us evidenced-informed change in all classrooms in our family of schools.”

2. Collaborative leadership

Rebecca Cramer, CEO of Reach Schools, visited Singapore in 2022. She explains that headteachers are moved between schools every seven years, with placements decided by the Ministry of Education. She says this means “the best headteachers get moved to the schools where they are needed the most”.

“In Singapore, there is a system-wide concept, understood by all school leaders, that one day your school might be my school, so there is a really clear sense of collective responsibility for all schools to be great, and that is incredibly powerful,” she continues.

“Obviously, Singapore is basically the size of Birmingham, not England, but if we could think about a local authority or a MAT creating that sense of shared accountability for our children, I think that is something we could learn a lot from. For me, that was the most instructive mindset shift.”

Tim Coulson, CEO of Unity Schools Partnership, who visited Singapore on the programme in 2023, says there are elements of policymaking that could also work in the UK.

Leaders can be called to work in the Ministry of Education, he explains.

“It means that those responsible for creating policy are colleague heads,” he says. “And it was clear that while, of course, there will always be a range of opinions among school leaders, there is a sympathy for the policymakers there because they understand the school system and the challenges of school leadership.”

Cramer agrees. “One of the things that struck me was this idea that the people in charge of the system are the people who know how to run amazing schools,” she says. “There’s a sort of us-and-them mentality here, and it’s not helpful.”

3. Long-term planning versus autonomy

Singapore has a long-term change management view of policy: everything the country does is carefully laid out across years to hit certain objectives. They “work backwards from a six-year plan” and “do the groundwork so that by the time the change happens, everyone’s on board with it and the issues have been flushed out”, Cramer says.

While the political contexts are very different in Singapore and England, it doesn’t mean we can’t plan to do the same within a MAT or local authority, Douglas says.

She gives the example of curriculum planning, where there is an expectation that the curriculum in Singapore will be in place for six years. At the start of Year 4, an expert team starts to review how effectively the curriculum is working and by the middle of Year 5, adjustments or whole-scale changes have been planned. Importantly, that means that for the rest of Year 5 and Year 6, training can be delivered to teachers to ensure they are empowered to deliver the new curriculum.

Carratt found himself reflecting on what the differences in the political system meant for education.

“It was challenging in some ways, because the Singaporean political system is very different to ours,” he says. “The whole education system is a clear part of the machinery of government in a way that it’s just not the case in the United Kingdom.”

He said this was made clear when Singaporean leaders conducted their reciprocal trip to the UK.

“It made me realise how transparent our system is in many areas,” he reveals. “[Our Singaporean counterparts] found it quite jarring to see that we have school leaders who speak openly in the media against the government, and they found that incredibly difficult to understand, both why you’d want to but also how you could do that without consequence, because they are very public figures and public civil servants who service the local communities that they’re responsible for.”

But he says he did come away with a sense of the “allure” of such a system in terms of how it “allows for a really integrated, long-term plan for education as one pillar of a broader societal progression”.

He adds that education is by no means paint by numbers in Singapore. He says the Singapore approach means that “the elected officials give the profession real agency and a real presence, and actually, a large degree of autonomy within defined parameters around policy development”.

“So when they need to build a new school, for example, it happens quickly, effectively, seamlessly, and there’s workforce planning in place to be able to allocate teachers and move them around schools.”

“Interestingly,” says Douglas, “as well as recognising the benefits of long-term planning, English heads come away from the exchange grateful for the amount of autonomy they have within their own schools or MATs - allowing them to be creative, flexible and responsive to changing needs. It’s fascinating to see them grapple with the balance.”

4. Inspection

Cramer says she was impressed with the different approach to annual inspections in the country.

“They know when people are going to come into their school and they can plan for it in the school calendar,” she says. “It’s seen as a really important time and it’s rigorous. There’s collaborative feedback and there’s an agreement about what the school needs to do to improve. So then when they come back the following year, they can work on that and see if it has happened.”

It’s the same team that comes back the next year, she continues, bringing both consistency and clarity to the process, and “a cycle of continual school improvement and clarity that we just don’t have”.

“It didn’t seem to lose rigour or accountability, but it removes some of that stress and uncertainty,” she says.

5. IT strategy

Caroline Barlow, headteacher at Heathfield Community College and joint chair of Headteachers’ Roundtable, was part of the cohort that visited the country in 2022. As the leader of a one-to-one iPad school, Barlow recalls being excited to hear about a pilot in one of the Singaporean secondary schools they visited, where they were trialling having students work asynchronously from home one day per fortnight.

It was interesting, she says, because they were using the same equipment as her school in the UK, so there was “huge potential for similarity”.

“But we’re in a local authority-maintained school, so we would hit the buffers of safeguarding straight away,” she says.

Douglas says this is a good example of how the programme makes us ask questions about how systems operate.

“We know we’d need to ensure safeguarding checks were in place and were robust, but are there ways of exploring different ways for children to work that might suit some learners better?” she asks.

“Walking around the classrooms, they’re no more digitally gratuitous than a standard English school,” he says. “You’re in an average classroom. And the infrastructure within teaching is very similar to ours. But I think the availability of resources, and the plan and investment from the government, is subtly but significantly different.”

There is, he explains “absolute cohesion and coherence, and investment on a national level”, which is seen not only in the equipment that schools have but also in how they “equip their schools to deliver digital education, with the skills and knowledge that their pupils need to have to be active participants in a digital economy”. That means the same types of devices and the same working patterns across all schools.

“That comes from the ministry,” he says. “I think it exposes the flaws in the English system: there is no digital transformation policy that’s being led by the Department for Education.

“I came back and said that we need somebody to lead digital transformation in our curriculum at the MAT level. We need to not wait for this to come through the National Curriculum. We need to stop sitting around and assuming that the government is going to do this. This is our job.”

6. Inclusive schools

While the narrative in England is that we aren’t doing enough to create truly inclusive schools, Singaporean visitors to England consistently draw attention to the inclusive nature of English schools in terms of pupils and their families, noting how much schools do for those new to the country, those with English as an additional language and those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

“While we are calling for reform of our SEND system, our Singapore colleagues felt they learnt much from what we are already doing,” Coulson says.

Douglas agrees. “One of the things they highlight is the inclusion of pupils with SEND in mainstream schools,” she says. “They see very diverse cohorts of children, and they think that we’re very good at being inclusive and working with families, and that we’re very good at being welcoming. They often talk about our whole-school approaches to making sure that classrooms are inclusive.”

This recognition that there is as much to learn in England for Singaporean teachers as there is for English teachers in Singapore is a critical factor in the success of the programme to date - and is how international comparison between systems should work, says Douglas.

“Both countries have great strengths,” she continues. “Sometimes, because of where Singapore comes in the Pisa tables, there might be an assumption that they’ve cracked everything. But if you spoke to a Singaporean, they would absolutely not say that.

“They continuously work to develop their practice and their provision, but it isn’t a perfect system. There are brilliant things about it, but there is also much we have to be proud about in the English system.”