Hairon Salleh

Over the past decade, the Singapore government has introduced various initiatives such as Teach Less, Learn More and engaging minds to develop students’ 21st century competencies. One significant approach adopted in these initiatives is to encourage school-based curriculum innovations (SCI).This current initiative involves the participation of all schools in the system. A marked departure from previous practice, schools in Singapore now have more autonomy and space in SCIs through engaging in school-based curriculum development (SBCD) activities. In this study, we used the terms SCI and SBCD interchangeably. This study is novel in taking a comprehensive approach in developing this baseline research of curricular and pedagogical reforms of nine schools in Singapore.

The term school-based curriculum development (SBCD) implies that teachers are to innovate and customize school curricula according to their local needs. This also means that SBCD requires co-constructive work among schools’ key stakeholders in the school curriculum development process. While much work has made known on SBCD in Western contexts, much less is known in non-Western contexts. This paper reports on key findings pertaining to SBCD drawn from a case study of a primary school in Singapore. Singapore makes for an interesting case as education policymakers encourage schools to innovate their curriculum yet maintaining a steep culture of academic achievement and control over standards across schools. The study involved data collection from non-participant observations of classroom lessons, teacher group meetings and focused group discussions. A salient finding that had emerged from the study is that the societal value for pragmatism underpins the processes of SBCD.