Singapore’s maths education had led to consistently high results in international student studies, with the New Zealand Government saying our revised maths curriculum being rolled out this year is influenced by their example, as well as Australia’s. 1News Reporter Kate Nicol-Williams travelled to Singapore to find out what maths instruction there involves and what New Zealand could learn to improve our persistent maths decline.
“There is no secret recipe.” So researchers and policy makers from around the world who want to know about Singapore’s highly effective approach to maths are told by National Institute of Education Associate Professor Choy Ban Heng.
“But if you really push me to the limit and you want me to give some reasons for, perhaps, our relatively good performance, I would say there are two main aspects,” he added. “One will be our curriculum, and second is really the quality of our teaching force.”
In the last round of OECD study Programme for International Student Assessment, known as PISA, Singapore 15-year-olds achieved the highest results in mathematics, reading and science in 2022.
New Zealand students achieved above the OECD average in all subjects. However, our maths decline continued with a mean score of 479. Although that’s still above the OECD average of 472, in the inaugural 2000 PISA maths test, New Zealand’s mean score was 537 – the third highest behind Japan and Korea.
Singapore’s history is another factor that drives the country’s approach to education, even today, Choy says.
“Our only resource is human and so, since the founding of our nation, education has been seen as a key lever to raise the standard of living for our citizens.”
In 1959, the year Singapore became self-governing, it faced the challenges of achieving economic growth as a small city state with few natural resources, and uniting country when most residents had immigrated there and sometimes clashed.
Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, known as the founding father of Singapore, understood education was the key he could use to unlock the country’s development and strength as a nation.
Yew told educators “how important a role the Government expects the teachers to play in building our new nation”.
He served as the country’s leader for more than 40 years, from 1959 to 1990. His People’s Action Party has remained in power for 65 years.
The vision he set out has certainly been achieved. The nation was ranked as the most competitive economy in the world in the International Institute for Management Development’s 2024 research. Singapore’s economic development website notes the country’s GDP per capita is the highest in the Asia region.
Relationship with NZ
New Zealand has a close relationship with Singapore as our largest trading partner in South East Asia.
Both countries are motivated to improve student outcomes to grow their economies and education is one of the areas of agreed cooperation. Our education systems, reflective of our cultures, though are quite different.
Some of Singapore’s distinctive features include streaming students for secondary school selection and subject streaming, an assessment focus, a strong system of teacher selection, training, development and review, and a curriculum that has changed from being knowledge-focused to incorporating critical thinking skills to prepare students for the changing world. Education technology, including the use of artificial intelligence features, is used in classrooms.
The Singapore Government gives students yearly bank account payments to spend on education. On the area of discipline, boy students can be caned “for serious offences as a last resort, when absolutely necessary”. In New Zealand, corporal punishment in schools was abolished in 1987.
Emeritus Professor Berinderjeet Kaur from the National Institute of Education said maths teachers in Singapore use a range of teaching methods, as do teachers from other countries.
“The distinction may lie in what actually is the underlying thread that pulls these things together and that is where I would say that our CPA approach is paramount.” CPA stands for the concrete, pictorial, abstract model.
In the concrete stage, students have a hands-on learning experience using material resources like blocks to demonstrate concepts.
In the pictorial stage, the objects become visuals on a worksheet, in a textbook or the whiteboard. This is the bridging step, where students can visualise the maths problem.
Finally students progress to the abstract stage. Numbers and symbols are used to solve problems. The idea is with the foundation of the other stages students can visualise these concepts more clearly.
“We find that generally, the children are able to understand the questions better so when they learn to pick up certain key information and present in a pictorial way,” Yangzheng Primary School head of mathematics Toh Peng Tee said.
Most of the new maths resources funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Education incorporate the same method. CPA has been replicated in resources and tutoring by education businesses globally, with many branding the approach “Singapore Maths”.
Singapore’s maths curriculum framework was developed more than thirty years ago, placing problem solving at the core. Attitudes, metacognition, skills, concepts and processes complete the pentagon model.
“That stability offered by the framework allows us to be nimble in response to the changes around the world and at the same time focus on the fundamentals which are key in the learning of mathematics,” Choy said.
Yangzheng Primary School students 1News spoke to connected educational achievement with success in the future.
“If our education, we get it good, we can get a better job and a better job gives you a better pay,” Year Six student Chew Zi Ying Celeste said.
“My mom always says I need to learn all my subjects. I need to do very well on all those subjects so I can get a good score in PSLE (Primary School Leaving Examination) and getting a good score in PSLE will determine our secondary school,” fellow student Goh Wei Ming Aden said.
The students recommended peers finding maths challenging should keep trying.
“I would tell them to read the question carefully, read it a few more times and break it down into smaller parts so you can understand it more,” Goh said.
“In life, if we give up, we’ll just stay there but if we try, who knows, we might get it correct. We may just go up,” Chew added.
Problem solving focus
New Zealand’s new maths curriculum has an increased focus on problem solving as part of the guidance for teachers on what a comprehensive maths and statistics programme should include.
Choy said Singapore’s education sector puts a high value on teachers continuing to develop their knowledge.
“We see teacher education as a lifelong process. Right from the beginning to the end of their career, professional development plays a very critical role in their own development as teachers.”
Teachers are entitled to 100 hours of professional development a year in Singapore, he said.
In New Zealand, professional learning is part of the teaching standards the workforce must uphold, but there’s no set annual entitlement.
Massey University Professor Jodie Hunter said New Zealand’s maths achievement decline began around the same time school support agencies and a range of teacher professional development opportunities were removed.
“Professional development’s been whittled down and whittled down and now it’s really hit and miss in terms of what’s schools are engaging with.”
Choy said the workforce is strengthened by the fact that all teachers who study for their qualification in Singapore receive high quality instruction at the National Institute of Education, the only teacher training provider.
Entering the profession is highly competitive with most eligible students’ being high academic achievers.
Study is funded by the Ministry of Education Singapore and a salary is provided during this period, which is topped up after graduation.
Singapore Teachers’ Union general secretary Mike Thiruman said the approach has worked so far.
“The quality of teachers – and to tell everyone, to tell the society you know – these are not run-of-the-mill people who get into the teaching profession.
“These are highly-qualified people, right, and they need to be respected and we have chosen them carefully to get into this profession.”
Minister: ‘Fascinating’
Education Minister Erica Stanford got a taste of Singapore’s education system while attending an international teaching summit in April last year.
“It was fascinating going to Singapore. They do some things really well but there were some things I looked at and I thought actually, you know, we do some things better than they do,” she said.
Stanford said Singapore’s teaching profession was a standout. Singapore teachers have three career pathways, which includes the likes of “master teachers”, as well as research roles and management positions.
“I love the way that they value the teaching profession,” Stanford said. “They have master teachers and expert teachers that they want to keep in the classroom and that’s certainly a model that I would love to see in New Zealand. That we value that workforce and that we have a pathway for teachers by staying in the classroom but being valued for the expertise and the knowledge and the professionalism that they have.
“I love that model.”
Singapore teachers can work in their Ministry of Education in areas like curriculum development before returning to teach.
“They will have realised what are the challenges that teachers face on a day-to-day basis and so when they formulate the policy, there’s always this cognisance of what’s happening in the classroom,” Choy said.
Hunter at Massey University said New Zealand hasn’t had an interconnected approach in the education system since the 1980s.
“Instead it’s become disconnected and everybody’s kind of competing and at odds,” she said. “They’ve [Singapore] got a whole lot of interconnected systems which are working really well together to create an education system which is world-class and leading.”
‘Go a little slower’
Both Choy and Kaur from the National Institute of Education have advice for New Zealand as the country begins learning a new maths curriculum.
“Definitely, I think they need to go a little bit slower. Go slow in order to go far,” Choy said.
The New Zealand Government brought forward the introduction of the mathematics and statistics curriculum for primary and intermediate aged students and Pāngarau curriculum for Māori immersion and kura kaupapa students by a year to 2025, citing the urgency of addressing the country’s long-term maths decline.
Four professional development days for teaching the new curriculum are on offer to teachers over 2025 and 2026, with the first opportunity to access this training beginning in January.
“For any implementation of change in a system, teachers are the ones who are going to carry it out and therefore teachers need a lot of support and teachers need to be kind of given the support before the change can be taken to the classroom,” Kaur said.
She said teacher development needs to be provided on a continuous basis.
‘Time to get better at teaching maths’
Newlands Intermediate School outgoing principal Angela Lowe said schools are welcoming the new maths curriculum.
“There’s not a teacher, a leader, a school or a community in New Zealand that doesn’t think it’s time to get better at teaching mathematics,” she told 1News.
Lowe said the curriculum schools have been using since 2007 requires teachers to design each lesson. “I can’t tell you that every teacher is capable of doing that.”
The new curriculum aims to make it clear what should be taught and in which year. What teachers should focus on for effective maths instruction is included and there is teacher guidance for each learning area.
But Lowe too has concerns about the pace of change affecting an improvement in maths instruction.
“I can appreciate that the Minister and the ministry are by and large in a hurry. They want the results to improve quickly. I have reservations about doing things too fast.
“My advice to the ministry would be keeping on looking for providers, looking for providers that can provide the on-site, face-to-face leadership in this area and lifting practice,” she said.
Hunter said she worked with a New Zealand school on implementing the new maths curriculum one day this week, and they could only partly cover one of the six maths and statistics concepts in that time.
“It’s problematic to be rolling out a curriculum without having had teachers really engage in any in-depth professional learning and development about the new curriculum.”
* 1News travelled to Singapore with the support of the Asia New Zealand Foundation.
