Ang Mo Kio GRC MP Intan Azura Mokhtar, deputy chairperson of the Government Parliamentary Committee (GPC) for Education, said teacher recruitment could fall further due to the shrinking cohort sizes and ongoing efforts to retain senior teachers longer.
Annual teacher recruitment in Singapore has dropped from a peak of 3,000 in 2009 to about 900 in 2015. As of last year, there were a total of more than 33,300 teachers in service.
Meanwhile, the island nation’s education ministry continues to recruit to replace teachers who have left the service, with a focus on recruiting more teachers in specific subject areas such as Art, Music, Humanities, Physical Education and Tamil.
However, with school mergers possibly becoming more frequent, Associate Professor Jason Tan from the National Institute of Education (NIE) said teachers will have to make “big adjustments”.
Tan pointed to areas such as content knowledge, teacher-student relationship and classroom management when they are redeployed to other schools in the wake of consolidation.
A teacher from Lianhua Primary, who requested anonymity, told Today Online that it is “a good chance for the Ministry of Education to do a big reassessment of the deployment of teachers”.
The teacher suggested that instead of posting some of them to the ministry, more teachers could be sent to schools to teach smaller classes.
Tan pointed out that there is no consensus among international researchers that smaller class sizes are truly beneficial, and the current system has been serving students well for decades.
Tan cited studies by renowned Professor John Hattie, who is the director of the University of Melbourne’s Education Research Institute, which concluded that class size does not have a major influence on learning outcomes.
However, given that no similar studies have been done in Singapore, some experts felt that the Ministry of Education should consider conducting its own research.
Tan says this could be tricky to execute. Among other things, a random study might raise questions among parents on why their children’s schools were or were not selected, he said.
Adding that private tuition which is pervasive here might also skew the results, he said: “That makes it harder to establish the co-relational link between class size and students’ performance that we’re looking for.”
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