1. It has often been suggested that MOE should reduce class sizes. We take this very seriously. This is often a proposed solution. I thought it is important for us to bear in mind what problems we are trying to solve first.
2. What class size should we aim for? Is it 30? 20? 10? If so, why?
3. Let's examine the issue more closely. Is our problem statement the need to improve teacher-student interaction? Or is our problem statement to reduce teachers' workload? Or is it because we believe smaller is better, regardless of the subject being taught or teacher quality?
4. Chair, we all want to reduce workload for our teachers. But with a finite teaching force and a certain number of students, do we mean to ask our teachers to teach smaller classes but more classes? Or do we mean we should employ more teachers, perhaps doubling our teaching force to halve all class sizes?
5. Is that feasible without affecting quality? Is that the best way to use our teaching resources even if we assume we can double our recruitment from broadly now 2% of every cohort to 4% of every cohort?
6. Or do we mean for our teachers to teach less? We have benchmarked our curriculum with other developed countries, we are already teaching just similar amounts or sometimes less than others. We often hear calls for MOE to include more in our curriculum, including from many members today in your speeches, to have more lifeskills, future skills, soft skills, to prepare our children better for life.
7. Chair, maybe I should explain. Today, we do not have fixed teaching class size in all our schools. We allocate our finite teaching resources according to the needs of our students, complemented by technology. Most form classes have two form teachers to guide the social-emotional development of our children, compared to one in the past when we were in school.
8. Students with higher needs, have smaller teaching class size. Classes that benefit from student interaction have bigger class sizes. For classes where we can use technology to scale, we have even "bigger class sizes" in the hundreds and yet achieve mass customisation.
9. So Chair, indeed, we want to refocus our teachers' energies to not over-protect students or over-support learning. Instead, we want our students to exercise agency in organising activities and take more responsibility for their learning. This way, they learn more for life.
10. Chair, we share the goals for more personalised teaching, more personal attention for every student, and more focused work for our teachers. I think we can all agree on that. Indeed, I am for organising our teaching resources to achieve the effective class size of one, where we need, but not regardless of need.
11. Let's focus the discussion on how we can achieve this, through the following ways:
- The way we focus our teachers' efforts in doing what's necessary for our students and not overdoing things. The way we use technology to complement our teachers' capabilities, to scale up quality resources at affordable cost;
- The way we equip our teachers to do their best for our students;
- The way we teach our students to exercise agency and responsibility in their learning journeys; and
- The way we partner our teachers to set the right expectations for ourselves and our children.
12. Interested members may also wish to refer to independent studies by OECD on the various factors that are perhaps more important than class size in determining the quality of teaching and learning.