There’s been a lot of online chatter about our Prime Minister Lawrence Wong’s recent announcement that the GEP in its existing form will be scrapped, and replaced instead with a high ability programme localised in schools.

Under the existing programme, at Primary 3, 1% of students are selected from two standardised tests and these students, if they so choose, will proceed to one of nine primary schools to continue their education with they fellow selected students in this dedicated programme.

Under the new programme, 10% of the students will be selected based on one standardised test, and will continue their development in their respective areas of strength (English or Maths) in their existing schools, and some will get to participate in after school programmes with students from neighbouring schools to further deepen their development in their areas of strengths.

Having been part of the programme myself for 7 years, and having a son who’s been through 3 years of it, I thought I would also weigh in with our experience of this programme and why I feel deeply saddened at this piece of news.

1. Loss of an extremely good well-rounded programme

First of all, I have to say that the GEP is an excellent programme and both Mr Uno and I have benefitted greatly from it. Anyone who knows me will know that I strongly support this programme and that I always pitch that this programme in its existing form should be extended to more students.

Despite what most people believe, the GEP is not an academic programme, and this is repeatedly emphasised to parents of the selected students prior to them deciding whether or not to let their child enter the GEP. I distinctly remember being told, at Mr Uno’s briefing session, that “The GEP is not an academic programme. If your aim is to do well in the PSLE, this is not the programme for you.”

True to what it promises , the GEP wasn’t strictly an academic programme. If you’re in school, there is no doubt some academic learning going on, but the GEP prioritises learning over studying, and this is reflected in the way they assess the students. Throughout the three years, Mr Uno’s weighted assessments have comprised writing a fractured fairy tale, designing a tri-fold pamphlet to introduce a book, acting out a skit, and interviewing an immigrant. Even in P6, his weighted assessments included writing a 2000-word biography on a family member and designing a logic puzzle. This surprises many people who gawk and go, “How does this help in the PSLE?”

But that’s exactly what the GEP is not for – it is not for prepping students to ace the national exam. People who comment that “Anyway not all GEP students do well academically” have missed the point completely. It is a learning programme for deeper learning that is fun and engaging.

While many people are possibly already cramming for the PSLE in P6 Term 2, I eagerly anticipated Mr Uno beginning his study on the book Friedrich, in English class. I studied the same book in P6 30 years ago, and it was the single most impactful book I read in primary school. Mr Uno only knows how excited I was for him to read it, having bought a copy for him when he was in K2, and sharing history nuggets on various events, including the Holocaust with him since he was in P1. He was always a history buff, especially on WW2 history so he always listened and read with keen interest.

The broad scope of the programme beyond the usual academic curriculum is its greatest strength. From learning how Egyptians and Romans wrote their numerals and did arithmetic, to why humans count in base 10, to learning about the various types of discrimination and solving rebuses and cracking an entire letter written in code, students are exposed to so many different concepts and learn to fall in love with learning. I remember every bit of the fun stuff that we were taught that were never tested in any national exams, and I remember waiting in anticipation as these same things were taught to my son. He will remember every single bit of his learning experience the way I did.

It is such a shame that this incredibly well designed curriculum is no more.

2. Increased emphasis on academics under the new programme

The GEP was never meant to be an academic programme and this is something that the MOE website also stresses. This is also quite apparent through not only their entrance tests, which are not designed to test your academic knowledge but rather your reasoning and pattern recognition skills, but also their periodic assessments, which again are very focussed on project work, team work, and investigative skills.

Dropping such a programme would really go against MOE’s direction of trying to make our education system less academic focussed, but instead one that embraces a more well-rounded development.

One of the strengths of the GEP is also its focus on social studies, something which I feel mainstream education does not emphasise as much on due to its focus on examinable subjects. Social studies has always been an important part of the GEP curriculum, and it requires many investigative and research tasks of the students by requiring them to interview an immigrant, or use skits, videos, or Minecraft projects to showcase certain elements of Singapore’s history as part of their weighted assessments. At the beginning of the programme, social studies was also an examinable subject at the PSLE for GEP students. Losing such an important element of this programme that fosters history and cultural awareness into students cannot be beneficial to our youth.

3. The new programme has the potential to breed more elitism

The GEP has always de-emphasised academic performance. 30 years ago, across the two primary schools I attended, the entire mainstream cohort was ranked in order of academic performance both at the class and at the school level, and awards were given out to the top performers. The ranking was removed for the GEP classes only and GEP students were not aware of their relative academic performance compared to their peers. Right now, the de-emphasis on academic performance continues to persist in the GEP and it is apparent in the way the GEP assesses its students in the forms of projects and other assignments which are not directly related to academic excellence.

Because of the way the programme is designed, to focus on the learning rather than studying, and also the focus on more in-depth learning and exploration beyond the academic syllabus, few GEP students generally consider good academic results an indicator of diligence rather than intelligence. Very few GEP students actually care very much about your or their own academic results other than the very practical fact that they have to rely on it to enter the school of their choice.

“Elitism”, and I used inverted commas because many times I suspect it exists only in the eyes of the beholder, can observed at ALL levels. Under the streaming system in my time, the EM1 students looked down on the EM2 students who looked down on the EM3 students. I have heard EM1 students calling fellows students “stupid’ because they’re in EM3. Heck, I was mocked by a parent while having lunch in my own school canteen before ECA for being in the “D” class (in those days, EM1=A class, EM2=B1/B2 and EM3=C, and GEP students were assigned to the D classes but the parent was unaware.) In secondary school, the Express stream students looked down on the Normal stream students. When I was part-timing after my “A” levels, I hung out with two Normal stream students who lamented how the Express stream students would mock and taunt them. These don’t often come to light because it seldom triggers public outrage unless you’re from one of the “elite” schools, in which case, your full name, address, and the last time you pooped would have been dug out and published on the public web by some self-righteous vigilante. 

Starting a “high ability” programme in all primary schools is streaming all over again, and after so many years of trying to harmonise student profiles by having mixed ability classes, we’re no doubt regressing into classifying students into discrete tiers based on their tested ability and performance.

4. Camaraderie and multiplication of learning  

A very large part of the fun of going to school is learning and consorting with your birds of a feather. GEP children tend to have very keen interests in a very wide range of topics and enjoy delving deep into them. I remember Mr Uno coming home with a very odd assortment of books that he exchanged with his friends – he has a collection of thick and very technical chess books which dive deep into a specific opening that he brought to school to exchange for various books across many disciplines such as crime, politics, history, and puzzles.

Some of the books took me by surprise, like when he brought home “Guilty as charged: 25 crimes that have shocked singapore since 1965” in P4, but I learnt to get used to his very extensive range of reading interests. Both Mr Uno and I have learnt so much simply from the exchange of books, ideas, and conversations with our fellow classmates. The learning multiplies simply because there is a central programme where these children can converge to share and discuss their interests with one another.

Without a central convergent point, this learning multiplication cannot happen because it is often unlikely to find multiple students with such keen concentrated interest in a broad range of topics in a single school.

5. Neuro-divergence

This is a topic I have read up extensively on, even before my first child was born but is a topic I hesitate to ever talk about because it is a sensitive topic, one that is often misunderstood and sometimes even mocked, among other reasons.

I decided to mention it only because it has been mentioned many times and often in the same vein as this topic of GEP. Many GEP students identify or are diagnosed as neuro divergent, and this is also quite consistent with my own observations and experiences, with many of these students being 2e, or twice exceptional. Hence, many GEP students consider themselves to have been “saved” by the system, and to have found a place where they belong.

I have some strong views on this that may never see the light of day, but for today, I will only say that in the GEP, I have found the most accepting, understanding, and supportive people that I have ever met in my life. More than 20 years after leaving the programme, this is still true.

Tl;dr

In conclusion, I do feel deeply saddened at the loss of an excellent programme, as do many people I know who have been through it. I would have considered it a lot more beneficial to the student population in general to extend the programme in its current form to more students, and allow them to stretch and develop their interests and talents under the guidance of the existing teachers already trained to nurture these eager children.

The 10% of the students that the new programme is intended to reach, would be so much more enriched under the existing GEP than the proposed “high ability” programme which at the moment sounds more like an academic extension rather than a separate enriched curriculum.