Singapore Has Stopped Sorting Twelve-Year-Olds into Streams — Epoche B1
Singapore has ended streaming in its secondary schools. For about four decades, a pupil's score in the Primary School Leaving Examination, taken at twelve, decided which track they entered — Express, Normal (Academic) or Normal (Technical) — and the track then shaped almost everything that followed. It has been replaced by full subject-based banding. 1980: the tracks are built Streaming was introduced after a government review in the late 1970s, when many children were leaving school without completing it. Sorting pupils by pace was meant to reduce that, and by its own measure it worked. What the tracks also did A track is a label as well as a timetable. Pupils in the Normal streams reported being seen — and seeing themselves — as the slower ones, in every subject, on the strength of one examination sat at twelve. Teachers noticed it. So did employers. 2019: the announcement The Ministry of Education announced that streaming would be dismantled and replaced. Under full subject-based banding, a pupil takes each subject at one of three levels according to how they do in that subject, and sits in a mixed form class for the rest of the day. Full implementation reached the secondary intake in the mid-2020s, and a single national certificate is due to replace the separate examination certificates towards the end of the decade. Assessment The sorting has not disappeared. A pupil is still placed at a level in every subject, and the levels are still visible. What has changed is the unit: the subject rather than the child, and a placement that can move rather than a label fixed at twelve. That is a smaller change than "the end of streaming" suggests, and a larger one than it sounds. A system that sorted has not stopped sorting. It has stopped sorting people. References Ministry of Education, Singapore (2019). Learn for Life: Preparing Our Students to Excel Beyond Exam Results. Press release, 5 March 2019. Singapore: MOE. Goh, K. S. and the Education Study Team (1979). Report on the Ministry of Education 1978. Singapore: Ministry of Education.