Introduction
1. A very good morning to colleagues and members of the education fraternity.
2. Let me first start off by wishing everyone a Happy Teachers’ Day.
3. I would also like to thank the wider education community, including our school admin teams, counsellors, all staff and members of the MOE fraternity for educating our students and also progressing our education system.
4. Teachers are at the heart of education and everything that we do for our children. I am sure all of us will have a significant teacher who has taught us and impacted us some time in our life.
In Chinese, there is a saying – “????,????”. A day as a teacher has the responsibility almost like a parent for a lifetime.
Since our independence, we have always committed to recruiting the best, the most committed people to be our teachers.
This is part of our social compact that we will continually invest our very best for the next generation. We have done that for the last 57 years, and we have every intention to continue doing that for many more years to come, so that Singapore will always distinguish ourselves in our investment for the future. And we do that by giving the best to the next generation through our teachers.
5. Education will continue to be a social leveller for Singapore for generations to come. If we want to distinguish ourselves as a place where anyone can rise to their fullest potential regardless of their background, then education is key.
And if education is key, our teachers and educators will be the central piece for us to deliver this promise and social compact to our people and nation.
Heritage Centre at Balestier
6. Today, we also mark the opening of a unique institution that chronicles the chapters of Singapore’s education history.
First, let me thank the team behind the MOE Heritage Centre on the official opening of the refreshed gallery at this new site at Balestier. Thank you to all the hard work behind the scenes.
7. This is a unique place that we want every teacher to come through as they start their new journey in the education service.
For us to chart our way forward, we must always know where we have come from, what have stood the test of time, what has served us well and at the same time, what are the challenges that we all need to overcome together.
I hope this centre will not just be a showcase of the evolution of our education system. It will also be a showcase of the ingenuity of our people as we overcome the challenges throughout the past generations.
And sometimes when the challenges seem so tough, this centre will also inspire us to look for new solutions and overcome the new challenges with ingenuity and tenacity just as our forefathers had done.
8. As a shared space, our Heritage Centre also pays tribute to the generations of teachers, and enables them to connect with one another.
This also serves to strengthen the collective identity of our education fraternity.
9. I encourage all of us to bring our family members, children and friends to come visit this place because there is so much here that we can share with fellow Singaporeans.
The resources available here will also help a new generation of teachers to have new ideas on what we can do going forward.
Singapore Education Story
10. As we walk through the gallery, we will see the various challenges that our nation has overcome in the past many years. And sometimes at this point in time, if we think that the challenges that we are facing is so daunting, perhaps when we look at the past, we can also draw strength on how we have overcome them.
From the early years in the 1960s when we started our nation building journey, when we did not always have the resources that we have now, how we have set the foundations in those early years, the type of value system that we want to inculcate in our people, our stance on bilingualism, our emphasis in the early years on numeracy and literacy, so that we can equip our people with the skillsets necessary for us to survive as a nation.
But those were just the early year challenges. In the 1970s and the 1980s, as we face the economic crisis then, the oil crisis, the Vietnam War, the 1980s economic crisis, we then had to transit to the next phase of our nation development, which is how to make ourselves a globally competitive economy. Because by the 1980s, we were no longer just trying to do things internal to Singapore and to survive. We have to be at the forefront.
And that transition continues into the 2000s where we have to embrace a new era of digital technologies. Not just for teaching, but also how our people interact and connect with the world.
11. While we have done so much in the early years for our main part of the school system, by the 2010s, our education journey has expanded to go upstream into the early years. Our investment in the early years have since increased by many times since the early 2010s. That is because we have increasing evidence of how the early years form that important foundation for us to build upon in the proper school years.
12. And now as we enter the next phase of our education journey, we have further expanded our mission even beyond that.
From the main school system to the early years, now we are looking at lifelong education, where our definition of success is not just how well we help our students to do for the first 15 years of their life, but how well we help our students to do well in the next 50 years of their life. How we imbue in them the passion for lifelong learning so that even beyond school, they will keep learning, keep improving, and remain competitive and relevant in the world of tomorrow.
13. So those are some of the chapters of our education story which are still unfolding, which we are still writing together. I thank all the teachers here, the generations of educators here – past and present – who have helped us through this journey and whom we still rely on to help us to take this journey forward so that we can truly embrace an education system where we have continuous meritocracy, whereby everyone will have a chance to fulfil their potential regardless of their starting point in life.
14. Everyone will be able to know that so long as they keep trying in their life, they will have the chance to succeed in Singapore and beyond. And we will continue to do more to make sure that everyone in Singapore understands this and have the assurance that we will keep investing in them throughout life.
Subsequently in the next year, in the coming months, we will make more announcements of how we intend to fulfil this vision of lifelong journey, this journey of continuous meritocracy.
15. Now we are also embarking on the Forward Singapore Exercise. This is an exercise of not just hearing each other’s aspirations of what we want to achieve for our education system or our children. This exercise is also a commitment by all of us, individually and collectively, what we are prepared to put into the system so that we can have an even better and stronger education system going forward.
I look forward to hearing your views and sharing ideas with you on how we can do even better.
Teachers’ and MOE Staff’s Efforts during the COVID-19 Pandemic
16. Now a short note on the COVID-19 pandemic. We are now just emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. The last two and a half years have not been easy, and I know all of you here and online have put in a lot of effort for us to be where we are today.
17. When I speak to my counterparts in many other countries, they all talk about the digital divide, they talk about the potential loss of a generation of learners for a few years.
18. But in Singapore, we have been largely fortunate to be able to not have to suffer the worst negative impact of the pandemic. That is because we have a group of teachers who are dedicated and committed. Dedicated and committed, not just to fulfilling their current mission to educate the students, but also even in the depths of the crisis, constantly trying to innovate.
When we first had to go on HBL (Home-based Learning), many of our teachers swung into action, leveraging technology to try to keep up the teaching and connection with students, finding new ways to keep the CCAs going so that not only do we continue developing our children on the academic front, we also keep continuing to help them to connect on the social-emotional front.
19. Without all these efforts, we will not be here today. There are just so many stories that we have captured over the last two and a half years and I am sure some of them will be in our heritage gallery of how we have overcome the COVID-19 pandemic together.
20. Of course we are not through it yet. There may still be some twists and turns but I am quite sure that with the kind of spirit, tenacity and ingenuity that we have seen in the education community, I am sure that we will be able to overcome any other crisis going forward.
21. But if we say that education is core to Singapore’s social mobility, core to Singapore’s cohesion, then we must also in the same breath say that our teachers are core to our mission. And for our teachers to deliver on their mission, we need to take care of the well-being of our teachers.
22. I have always said this when I visit schools, if I see the sparkle in the eyes of my teachers, I have no worries about the children. That is what I intend to do with the MOE team – to make sure that all our teachers have the sparkle in their eyes.
23. There is rising expectations in society of what our schools and teachers should be responsible for. There is also rising workload because the demands to take of the high needs and special needs students will continue to increase. The desire for us to teach our children ever more things to prepare them better for the future will also continue to increase.
24. The challenge for us is how do we find a balance, and how do we help ourselves help our teachers to overcome this and continue to shine?
First, technology. While there is a limit to how many good teachers we can continue to recruit in a population where the size is relatively stable, we can always leverage technology to increase the capacity of our teaching fraternity.
We have seen many more new pedagogies and andragogy being rolled out with the latest internet and social media tools that allow us to share our teaching resources.
I will encourage us to see how we can pull our resources together so that every teacher, young and old, new and experienced, can all experience the best teaching resources available to us, and then we can take it off the commonly shared pool and customise it according to our needs.
We can adopt more self-paced learning, self-directed learning, gamification and so forth, so that we can stretch our students according to their abilities. And that frees up time for us to devote more time to help the higher needs students.
Technology will be something that we will need to embrace more in order to create more capacity for our teaching fraternity to focus on higher needs students and the emerging demands.
Beyond the exploration of new technologies to create capacity, we also need to have a shared and common understanding of the expectations that we have between the school, teachers, parents and students.
What are our duties of care that we must make sure that we uphold and where we need to work in closer collaboration with the parents and alumni, so that we can draw upon their capacities and we have a shared expectation of what that partnership entails between the schools, the teachers and the parents.
We will never be able to do everything that we want in MOE alone. We need to figure out new partnerships with the community, with the parents, with the alumni to draw upon their strengths and for us to move forward as one.
We also need to make sure that we strengthen our culture.
We have a strong culture of care for our students and this we will continue.
But at the same time, we must also have a strong culture where we allow our students to learn to be resilient, learn to deal with uncertainties and the untidiness of life so that when they grow up, they will not just be technically competent, they will also have the inner strength and social-emotional resilience to face the turbulence of the world.
This is part of our culture that I hope to see in MOE as well.
Enhancing Support for Staff Well-Being
25. We will also dedicate more resources to the development of our teachers. I have always said this, as Yen Ching (Deputy Director-General of Education (Professional Development)) says, as the teachers pour out their hearts for our students, we must make sure that our teachers also continue to grow. Only then will they have the sparkle in their eyes, only then will they be able to influence the students under their charge.
26. This is why we will continue to expand the Teacher Work Attachment Plus (TWA+) Programme to allow more of our teachers to widen their exposures.
Because when our teachers widen their exposures, they will bring back with them experiences that they can pass on to the next generations. In the process, our teachers will continue to feel that they are growing. We will continue to widen the learning opportunities for all our teachers.
27. We will also expand the peer support programmes.
Many of you have set up the Wellness Ambassadors programme in your schools. That’s good. We will continue to make sure that we help one another, look out for one another, because if the students and parents can get stressed, so can the teachers. That is where we want to expand the resources available to our students and teachers to help one another to go through the tough times together.
28. Today, we are also happy to have worked with MOHT on this professional support where we are introducing the mindline.
It is a new resource space for our teachers to access help if they need to.
29. Next, we will also be rolling out flexible work arrangements to those teachers and schools who are able to accommodate these practices.
COVID-19 has given us many new lessons on how we can organise the work. Let us not waste those opportunities, gather those experiences, see what are those that work best for us in order for us to maximise the capacity of our teachers and allow them to have the flexibility where they can, to take care of their families and so forth. Only so when we take care of our teachers well will we have a strong, united teaching core. And when we have a strong, united teaching core, we fear not of the challenges that may come our way.
30. MOE is committed to make sure that we will continue to expand the support for all our teachers to bring out the best in our teachers in order for us to give our best to our students – the next generation.
31. Finally, in closing, I would like to thank everyone once again for your tremendous effort not just to help us get through COVID-19 safely, but also for the generations of educators who have helped bring Singapore to where we are today. Without our educators, without the investment in the next generation, Singapore will not be where we are today.
32. I would like to express my personal thanks to my own teachers who have brought me up. I would also like to express my thanks as a parent for all the teachers who are continuing to help educate my children. And as a Minister for Education, I would also like to express my thanks to the education fraternity because you are fundamental to how Singapore continue to have education as an uplifting force, as a force that unites our country, as a force that convinces generations of Singaporeans that we can all be equal and proud, regardless of our starting position in life.
33. Thank you all and Happy Teachers’ Day.
Source: Ministry of Education, Singapore