Snap Insight: Conceived for a minority of students, Gifted Education Programme has been overtaken by wider trends

SINGAPORE: One of the key announcements in Prime Minister Lawrence Wong’s inaugural National Day Rally speech was the discontinuing of the four-decade-old Gifted Education Programme (GEP) in its current form.
Instead, each primary school will offer its own programmes to stretch high-ability students in their areas of strengths and interest, with the possibility of students taking after-school enrichment modules in nearby schools. This means that students no longer have to transfer to a school that offers the GEP.
Mr Wong pointed out that this reform was part of his government’s move in the direction of realising the vision of “every school is a good school”.
The GEP, launched in 1984, was one of the first few programmes for academically talented students.
The Ministry of Education (MOE) stressed the need to meet the learning needs of gifted students who required “a high degree of mental stimulation”. It also said that nurturing these students and maximising their potential was an investment in Singapore’s future.
The GEP curriculum had a few distinctive features, including greater depth and breadth in topic coverage, inter-disciplinarity, and more emphasis on creativity and higher-level thinking skills.
The first cohort of 100 primary GEP students enrolled in Raffles Girls’ Primary School and Rosyth School, with another 100 students being placed in the secondary GEP in Raffles Girls’ School (Secondary) and Raffles Institution. The GEP students were taught in self-contained classes within these schools.
Over the next 20 years, the programme expanded from 0.25 per cent to 1 per cent of the relevant age cohort. In 2003, there were nine primary schools and seven secondary schools that offered GEP.
However, the GEP was scaled back in the years that followed. The 2004 launch of the Integrated Programme (IP), a programme for gifted secondary school students that allows them to skip the O-Level examination and proceed to junior college, resulted in shrinking GEP enrolments at secondary schools.
As a result, the MOE announced that GEP would end for secondary schools in 2008, and that it would advise IP schools in the design of their talent development programmes.
Another step in GEP’s evolution was the MOE’s Gifted Education Branch’s sharing of pedagogical strategies for highly able students with non-GEP primary and secondary school teachers. At the same time, a few primary schools that were not GEP centres started their own programmes for high-ability learners.
Issues of equity have surrounded the GEP. For instance, there has been statistical evidence of an over-representation in the GEP of students from socio-economically advantaged homes, while some parents have engaged tutoring centres to prepare their children for the GEP selection test.
In response to criticism that GEP students were not socialising adequately with their non-GEP peers, the MOE announced that from 2008, GEP students would spend from one-third to half of their curriculum time together with non-GEP students.
As Singapore’s schools look to maximise the potential of all students, their goals increasingly resemble those of the GEP. The GEP’s goals include developing attitudes for self-directed lifelong learning, enhancing aspirations for individual excellence and cultivating a commitment towards serving society.
The GEP, which was originally conceived for a tiny minority of students, seems to have been overtaken by wider educational and socio-political trends. The announcement that it will be discontinued in its current form is not entirely surprising in light of existing attempts by some primary schools to cater to their high-ability students.
What remains to be seen is how wider equity issues, such as the advantages that students from socio-economically advantaged homes enjoy in terms of accessing resources for high-ability learners both within and outside school, can be addressed.