MINISTRY OF EDUCATION

DR TONY TAN KENG YAM Minister for Education

Over the past few years, we have taken several initiatives to improve the quality of secondary and post-secondary education. In the next few years, the Ministry will accord a higher priority to strengthening primary education, restructuring and further improving vocational education, and giving parents and students more flexibility and choice in our education system.

Secondary Education

Secondary school pupils will enjoy a more conducive learning environment as we phase in single-session schools. The new civics and moral education programme will be introduced in the upper-secondary levels in 1992. It will help pupils to imbibe a sense of civic and social responsibility and sound moral values. The academic, personal and social development of students will also be enhanced through more effective and innovative curricular and co-curricular programmes. All these will better develop pupils into caring and thinking adults and prepare them for a fast-changing technological era.

As the independent schools consolidate, they will initiate new programmes, paving the way for more innovations in all schools.

Post-Secondary and Vocational Education

To meet the demand for trained manpower in the 1990s, we will build a third polytechnic, complementing the two existing polytechnics. It will have a full enrolment of 9,000 students, and will provide more training opportunities for 'O' level school leavers. Its permanent campus will be ready in 1993.

The Vocational and Industrial Training Board (VITB) will continue to improve the quality of its training programmes. VITB will also assist and support voluntary welfare organisations in vocational training for the disabled and in running their training centres. Tertiary Education

We will be upgrading the Nanyang Technological Institute into a comprehensive university in 1991, giving us two strong competing universities, the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and the National University of Singapore (NUS). Together, these two institutions will offer a wide variety of courses, including courses in the performing and visual arts.

NUS and NTU will also step up their post-graduate studies and research. In the next four years, together they will establish five institutes. NUS will have an Institute of Micro-electronics, a Clinical Research Centre at the Faculty of Medicine and a Centre for Advanced Legal Studies. NTU will have the National Institute of Education and the Institute of Manufacturing Technology.

Primary Education

To give our children a good start in education in the primary school years, we will improve the professional training of primary school teachers. In 1991, the Institute of Education will merge with the College of Physical Education to form the National Institute of Education (NIE), which will become an institute of the NTU. We will upgrade the present Certificate in Education programme to a Diploma in Education programme, and remodel the existing Diploma in Education course for graduates to a postgraduate diploma programme preparing teachers for both primary and secondary schools. We will also introduce a new four-year undergraduate programme to train primary school teachers.

To provide a more conducive learning environment, we will build better-designed primary schools, improve facilities in existing schools and work towards the introduction of single-session primary schools.

Language acquisition is central to learning. We will review the language curriculum with a view to providing pupils with a strong foundation for learning English and the mother tongue. Young Singaporeans must learn their mother tongues if they are to acquire a strong cultural foundation, and retain their Asian identities and values. We have started with the preparatory year programme in ten primary SAP schools. With the experience gained from this programme, the Ministry will consider how the benefits can be extended to the other primary schools.