The Goh Report and the practice of streaming kids

Most Singaporean adults will remember how the education system assessed, branded and sorted them as kids. At nine, after just three years of formal schooling, they took a test that told them, among other things, if they are “gifted” or just an average learner. Three years later, at 12, they took the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE), seen as a fatalistic, life-determining event where a three-digit score dictated which type of school you went to—“elite” or “neighbourhood”.

This form of categorisation, or “streaming”, has long been a cornerstone of the Singaporean education system now admired around the world. Singaporeans were typically streamed a few more times before reaching university. Each time, it determined the educational paths available, or unavailable, to them. Streaming ultimately became an inescapable part of schooling here, and it has its roots in the “Report on the Ministry of Education 1978”. Led by Goh Keng Swee, then deputy prime minister (and sometimes called the architect of Singapore’s economic, defence and education policies), the report is more commonly known as the “Goh Report”.

What Goh and his team found wasn’t promising. In 1970s’ Singapore, 60 percent of students who sat for the PSLE and the General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level (GCE) O-Levels failed one or both languages. Of Primary One students, 36 percent did not complete their secondary education, failing to receive at least three O-Level passes. Of Primary Six students, 33 percent in the English stream and 25 percent in the Chinese stream did not meet the minimum literacy requirement. More students either dropped out or failed out of school in Singapore than in France, Japan, Taiwan, and the UK.

This “failure to achieve expected standards” was one form of major education wastage in Singapore, reported Goh and his team. Low literacy rates combined with high attrition and the unemployability of those who had left school prematurely reflected an inefficient allocation of resources. There was also a wide variation in school performance, in terms of the passing rates of PSLE and GCE O-Levels results. Singaporean schools were performing inconsistently.

According to Goh, this was the result of a failure to cater to differences in pace of learning due to a rigid and uniform curriculum. “Our system of education, lasting twelve years, has been tailored to suit the brightest 12% of students…Retention inflicts a psychological trauma on the child and when this is repeated two or three times, it would be an exceptional child who does not lose interest in learning...We must accept the principle of teaching children of different learning capacities at different rates.”

Rectification would come in the form of streaming. The “Goh Report” proposed separating students into different “streams” according to their academic performance in Primary 3 and Primary 6. That way, students with similar “abilities” could be grouped together, creating a more tailored and efficient education system. More importantly, it would keep kids in school by targeting the problem of high attrition rates.

And it seems to have worked. Streaming, in combination with other recommendations that improved the organisational efficiency of the Ministry of Education (MOE), formed the basis of the New Education System (NES). Four decades later, our literacy rate is almost 100 percent (97.6%). Over 40 percent of Singapore’s labour force has a university degree or higher. Our 15-year-olds are even acing international education assessments, claiming the top spot (576 marks) in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and trumping their Canadian (554), Hong Kong (542), Scottish (534) and Taiwanese (527) peers.

But in 2019, MOE announced that it would abolish secondary school streaming by 2024. This was after several attempts to lessen its importance, following much soul searching by educators, parents and others.

What changed in 40 years? Even as streaming had apparently helped boost the performance of the overall student body, and supposedly improved the training and allocation of the labour force for a growing industrial nation, its deleterious impact on individuals was becoming clear. Among other things, the intense competition and sorting had ironically resulted in the very thing Goh had sought to ameliorate: “psychological trauma on the child.”

Behind the impressive PISA scores and the adulation from foreign educators eager to learn from “the Singapore model” is a more sobering story, one that speaks to that unique moment in 1970s-80s Singapore, when a technocratic elite attempted to engineer a population to meet the goal of maximum efficiency.  

This occurred against the backdrop of an economy slowly shifting from manufacturing to knowledge-based industries. It had just been affected badly by the oil crisis of the 1970s. That, coupled with Singapore’s relatively small workforce, was motivation enough to attempt to breed a new generation of knowledge workers.

The 10 men and two women of “Goh’s Daring Dozen”, as they were nicknamed, were “whiz-kids”, scholars and “successful products” of Singaporean schools like Anglo-Chinese School, National Junior College and Raffles Institution. All but one were engineers. “We just happen to be engineers. It was a coincidence, definitely not by design,” said Goh Kim Leong, a member of the team. All 12 met Goh’s criteria of a “good officer” worthy of this daunting project—smart, mature, bilingual and adept in social settings. The team was also young, the oldest being 32 and the youngest only 24. (Goh was 60.)

In the previous year, the Daring Dozen had visited schools, spoken with principals, teachers and students, and put MOE under a microscope. What worked and what didn’t? Who’s who? How does the ministry “tick”? Led by Goh, their “star” leader, the team worked relentlessly over the course of six months, sometimes through the night.

To Goh and his team of engineers, the cold hand of intervention at Primary 3 was necessary for the efficient allocation of resources. By “sorting” the student population, children would hopefully stay in school, and begin moving towards their place in Singapore’s occupational hierarchy. Their academic performance at nine and 12 was indicative of their future career paths—whether they’d be blue or white collar workers, a cab driver or a doctor. Policymakers needed to intervene on the behalf of these students for national efficiency, but more importantly, for their own benefit; streaming would help them achieve their realistic ability and protect their mental health.

“The end product [referring to the child] would have lost self-confidence, self-esteem and developed a host of character defects produced by feelings of inadequacy…since they are not exposed to competition from brighter children in classes, there is less danger of loss of self-esteem.”

In the political climate of the 1970s-80s, this sort of paternalistic state intervention on the basis of innateness wasn’t unexpected. Just five years after the Goh Report was submitted and while its recommendations were being rolled out in schools, then prime minister Lee Kuan Yew introduced the Graduate Mothers Scheme. Lee had been concerned about Singapore’s population potentially becoming “depleted of the talented” since graduate women were reproducing at lower rates. (“When the graduate man does not want to marry a graduate woman, I tell him, he’s a fool, stupid. You marry a non-graduate, you’re going to have problems, some children bright, some not bright. You’ll be tearing your hair out.”)

To correct this imbalance, Lee’s government implemented a policy that would allow children of graduate mothers with at least three children, among other benefits, priority in Primary One registration in a school of their choice. Conversely, the Small Family Incentive Scheme encouraged low income, less educated families to have fewer children. If both parents did not have any O-Level passes, women under 30 could receive S$10,000 if they agreed to undergo voluntary sterilisation after their first or second child. Should they have a third, they’d face a penalty of the same amount plus interest.

A firm conviction in predestined, innate ability can be dangerous. At best, it creates elitism. At worst, it takes on a racial dimension and justifies eugenics. In 1967, Lee had already professed his belief in the genetic superiority of East Asians over South and South-east Asians. Opponents of the Graduate Mothers Scheme recognised the dangers of Lee’s belief in eugenics. A year after it was introduced, the government scrapped the policy due to an immense backlash.

When streaming was recommended by Goh and the Daring Dozen, it also faced a fair amount of criticism. In an ST article on March 16th 1979, Dr Nalla Tan, then associate professor of social medicine and public health at the University of Singapore, said she was “very worried” about streaming children based on their academic performance after only three years of schooling. It “smack[ed] too much of elitism” and there would be “psychological trauma” from streaming, she said.

In Parliament, Sia Khoon Seong, a teacher and member of parliament, criticised MOE for “introducing too many changes in a short space of time…Officials in the Education Ministry…are still under the delusion that teachers are underworked…stop treating them like mere cogs in a machine. Treat them like human beings with the dignity they deserve.”

One can’t help but wonder if the report’s recommendations would have looked different if at least one educator had been included in the team. “To describe their mission as daring is to stretch one’s imagination. Nowhere was there any feat to show they are daring except they arrived at 8.30am and departed at 5.30pm,” one reader wrote in to ST. Could these engineers, who had “breezed through the [education] system with flying colours”, empathise with slower learners? The two women on the team admitted initial unfamiliarity with the problems faced by these students. The 10 men, on the other hand, “had no trouble relating”. Whiz kids, indeed.

Perhaps the most damning critique of streaming came from Goh himself. He called the practice “a beastly thing to do to a child”, an “invidious” practice that went “against egalitarian instincts”. But what are egalitarian instincts compared to maximising efficiency? Goh believed that, “beastly” though it was, streaming was fundamentally necessary for “talented young men and women of Singapore [to] be trained to the highest excellence they are capable of, [without any] constraint on their development.” (The “constraint” here being slower learners?)

Goh’s team recommended separating those who were academically gifted enough to handle two languages from those who struggled. By channelling slower learners into a special stream, these students could concentrate on honing one language while learning enough of another for simple conversations. Knowing one language well would be better than knowing two poorly. Some teachers concurred, “that would be better than trying to force two languages down their throats.” Others shared the Goh team’s belief in innate ability, “we have to face realities. If our children are not bright enough…we have to accept it.”

But “ability” isn’t static. The assumption that a person’s intelligence, potential and value can be reduced and encapsulated in a single score after three or even six years of schooling is a key weakness in the argument for streaming. Even if we were to accept, for argument’s sake, that intelligence is predestined, some children simply need time: to play, grow, experiment, make mistakes, reach their full potential. Streaming doesn’t allow for time.

Goh and his team of engineers created a blueprint for the social engineering of education in order to meet the industrial, economic demands of a young nation. As successful as it may have been, it’s uncertain how exactly this dehumanising “sorting” process has affected Singaporean children. But their worsening mental health might give us some idea. Primary school children have reported symptoms of depression and anxiety, and therapists are seeing students as young as seven struggle with school-related stress as they transition from kindergarten. Compared to their international peers, Singaporean children experience significantly more anxiety about tests and grades—the Samaritans of Singapore, a non-profit suicide prevention centre, has seen a rise in students contacting them during exam season. When exams are made to feel like a major milestone, one that might determine the rest of your life, is it reasonable for us to expect children to manage such intense stress?

“Children are being forced to mature too fast without the relevant foundation and reasoning power to reassure oneself. Society does not want to allow the luxury of taking it slow,” psychologist Daniel Koh, from Insights Mind Centre, told The ASEAN Post. Streaming is linked to other unintended consequences as well. Singapore is the “Myopia Capital of the World”, with 65 percent of children being myopic by primary six. A side effect of spending too much time studying and too little time playing outdoors?

Streaming also naturally leads to the prioritisation of exam-taking techniques over nurturing intellectual curiosity or encouraging experimentation. When students don’t feel safe to make mistakes, it’s hardly surprising that they grow up to be more risk-averse and less creative. Perhaps that explains why, despite our stellar scores in international tests like PISA, Singapore has produced proportionally fewer inventors, artists and business leaders. In Tharman Shanmugaratnam, senior minister’s words, Singapore has an “exam meritocracy…We know how to train people to take exams.”

In 2019, Louis Ng, MP, argued that streaming effectively widens this same social divide. “We are not just streaming our students based on results…The reality is that students in the Normal streams tend to have a lower socio-economic status than those from the Express stream,” said Ng. He pointed out that between 2014 and 2018, 69 percent of secondary school students who received financial assistance came from Normal streams. Conversely, a 2016 study found that children from higher socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to join the Gifted Education Programme (GEP) and attend Integrated Programme secondary schools and their affiliated primary schools.

This disparity combined with the low mobility between streams (a student from the Normal Technical stream has a less than one percent chance of moving to the Express stream) further entrenches Singapore’s existing socio-economic inequality. It also strengthens the link between streaming and occupational hierarchy: your exam performance at age 12 has the potential, both real and perceived, to lock you in a pathway for the rest of your life.

As a result of this rigidity, the stigmatisation of those labelled as poor performers is another pernicious problem. The loss in confidence and self-esteem in students who feel like there’s no way out of the pathway they’ve been locked into exposes a cruel dimension of streaming, one which has real effects on the social fabric of Singaporean society. Then education minister Ong Ye Kung highlighted this “trade-off between customisation and stigmatisation” in 2019.

Some might argue that most, if not all, countries “sort” their student population via large-scale standardised tests. The US uses Standard Assessment Tests (SATs), China has its infamously stressful gaokao (高考) and the UK shares our O- and A-level system. What made our version of “sorting” any different?

Age. Most American students take the SATs between the ages of 17 and 19, Chinese students take the gaokao at 18 and UK students, like Singaporean students, take O-levels around 16 and A-levels at 18. While they might have their version of GEP (America’s Gifted and Talented Programme, for example), their students aren’t assessed and streamed according to academic ability only three years into formal schooling. Singaporeans also take their first high-stakes major exam, the PSLE, well before their international counterparts. Given the aforementioned low mobility between streams, this offers local students little opportunity for second chances.

Introducing streaming at such a young age also embedded competitiveness in the school environment, which made it difficult to separate learning from the weight of exam-taking. When students are assessed based on relative merit, academic performance is determined by how well they do against their peers. There can only be so many ‘A’s; academic success therefore becomes an exclusive and limited resource, one which students have to contend for. This is opposed to an assessment based on absolute merit, where students are evaluated based on individual performance; they compete with no one but themselves. In other words, the way streaming was practised in Singapore made competition inescapable. A child’s intelligence and potential cannot exist in and of itself, it must be calculated in comparison with their friends.

In recent years, many international studies have disproved the effectiveness of streaming. The Australian Journal of Education, for example, published an international literature review that found that streaming generally negatively impacts student learning outcomes. Globally, educators also echo similar critiques of streaming: “Students that were assigned to the lowest track were condemned to live there for perpetuity” said Joseph Fatheree, an American instructor from Illinois. Meanwhile, Zimbabwe researchers concluded that streaming “promoted polarisation between top stream and lower stream learners.”

Taken together, these separate points—including the trade-off created between customisation and stigmatisation, and the polarisation that can occur when different learners are hothoused into different schools and classes—help us appreciate one of the main tensions in the debate around streaming in Singapore. On the one hand, many educators believe in the importance of what’s called “differentiated learning”, not only in terms of an individual’s unique developmental needs, but also in terms of the realities of having to resource schools and the larger economy effectively. Streaming is, in its purest and bluntest form, simply a mechanism to facilitate differentiated learning.

On the other hand, streaming was introduced at a moment when Singapore society was on the cusp of rapid change, fuelled partly by foreign capital and labour. Most importantly, socio-economic inequality has worsened over these past few decades, alongside a growing class consciousness and status competition. As the gap between Singapore’s highest- and lowest-paid professions has widened, so too has the social capital attached to them and thus the forms of differentiated learning. Streaming has become synonymous with propping up inequality—to Ng’s point. Lee’s beliefs in eugenics and individual responsibility may have also contributed to a more individualistic and narrow perspective on streaming and the occupational hierarchy.

Thus, in line with this global trend, but also to address this uniquely Singaporean mindset on streaming and education, MOE has abolished the Normal (Technical), Normal (Academic) and Express streams altogether. In its place, subject-based banding, where students are grouped in mixed-ability classes while taking different subjects at different levels that align with their pace of learning, was introduced. These initiatives, in combination with a new PSLE scoring system, the dropping of the fourth content-based A-Level subject from university admission scores, and the scrapping of mid-year exams for some levels in primary and secondary schools are part of an attempt to “re-balance” education so that it’s “more fun, more joyful [and] more holistic.”

While these initiatives are steps in the right direction, whether they will be able to uproot the deeply ingrained competitiveness in Singapore’s education system remains uncertain. For us to truly “re-balance” the system, a change in mindset for all—students, parents, educators and policy makers—is necessary alongside structural change. As long as we continue to invest in a rigid occupational hierarchy reinforced by large disparities in pay and social standing, it’s unclear just how effective changes to MOE’s policies can be.

The “Goh Report” was a sincere attempt at elevating the education levels of all Singaporeans and addressing the high attrition rates of the 1970s. Perhaps this colder, stricter approach to rectification was what we needed at the time. Streaming, “beastly” as it was, was the team’s most pragmatic answer to the weaknesses of the education system.

But now, at this juncture of our national development, could it be time to put together another report? If we were to gather a different Daring Dozen, one with members picked across society, including educators with on-the-ground knowledge, could we create a team that reflects the values, needs and concerns of today? If so, maybe this time we’ll no longer label and categorise our children in the way we have.

Jean Hew is Jom’s head of research. Since graduating from university in 2022, she’s been actively trying to reshape her relationship with learning: from one burdened with competition and a fear of making mistakes, to one that overflows with love and generosity. She is grateful to Rachel Tan for her input.