Making policy with ‘good ideas’: policy networks and the ‘intellectuals’ of New Labour

The educational reforms being enacted in Singapore can be considered exceptional in that they are being undertaken within a highly effective system. We explore these reforms using Brown and Lauder's ideal-typical analysis of ‘neo-Fordist’ and ‘post-Fordist’ models of national economic development. Singapore's reforms have been extensive, ranging from changes to early childhood education through to tertiary education. We examine the nature of state-market relations in education within the context of Singapore's ‘soft authoritarian’ political culture and assess the chances of success of the reforms.     

The Relation Between Preschoolers’ Vocabulary Development and Their Ability to Predict and Recognize Words

By age 2, children are developing foundational language processing skills, such as quickly recognizing words and predicting words before they occur. How do these skills relate to children’s structural knowledge of vocabulary? Multiple aspects of language processing were simultaneously measured in a sample of 2-to-5-year-olds (N = 215): While older children were more fluent at recognizing words, at predicting words in a graded fashion, and at revising incorrect predictions, only revision was associated with concurrent vocabulary knowledge once age was accounted for. However, an exploratory longitudinal follow-up (N = 55) then found that word recognition and prediction skills were associated with rate of subsequent vocabulary development, but revision skills were not. We argue that prediction skills may facilitate language learning through enhancing processing speed.     

Determinants of pre‐school quality in Singapore. An investigation of the effects on teachers,of parents’ involvement

Parents are usually anxious about the quality of pre‐school education for their children and Singapore is no exception. As such, research into quality indicators of pre‐school care and education continues to receive much attention, especially in terms of identifying which aspects are related to positive outcomes for children, their parents and the policy makers. However, the significance of the day to day pre‐school experiences per se, are rarely investigated. Rather than considering outcomes, this paper reports a study which is concerned with pre‐school teachers' views on selected aspects of their working environment, in particular their dealings with parents, as determinant measures of quality in pre‐schools.

The majority of pre‐school centres in Singapore have a central structure and environment which by necessity adheres to government regulations. Except for teachers' views and feelings about aspects of their working conditions, most of the usual measures of centre quality are regulated. The study is concerned to identify which features of their day to day encounters most satisfactorily contribute to their roles as pre‐school teachers, and to examine any differences attributable to qualifications and experience.

The results show, that whilst there are some differences between teachers according to qualifications and experience, amongst the most positive features are satisfaction with parents' involvement, children's behaviour, and positive support from other teachers.     

Multipoint Desktop Video Conferencing in Teacher Education: Preliminaries,problems and progress

Members of this research team are investigating the use of multipoint desktop video conferencing (MDVC) technology in Singapore to enhance the National Institute of Education's schools practicum partnership model. The project builds on the Singapore ONE ATM island-wide network and the high-speed ADSL line access provided by Singtel Magix. This infrastructure provides state-of-the-art support for the White Pine CU-SeeMe Meeting Point server and client software that enables students on teaching practice to conference with each other and their university-based supervisors. A typical conference involves four of five students at different schools and one staff member at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. These conferences provide opportunities for professional sharing between staff and students without the limits of time and space which are traditional constraints on conventional teaching practice.