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13 November 2019

Next year, 40 Singapore schools will be getting new principals, as part of the annual reshuffle exercise conducted by the Ministry of Education.

The rotation of principals allows schools to benefit from new perspectives, and enables experienced principals to bring and share best practices across schools”, said MOE.

Next year, first-time principals will be appointed to 21 of the schools involved in the exercise. They include Mr Kevin Pang Chin Keat, who will head Yuhua Secondary, and Madam Tey Kah Hwee, who will helm Cedar Girls’ Secondary.

Separately, Madam Haslinda Zamani, a cluster superintendent with MOE, will head Raffles Girls’ School (Secondary), while Madam Soh Lai Leng, current principal of Catholic High School, will helm the NUS High School of Math and Science.

The 40 principals will receive their letters of appointment from MOE’s director-general of education Wong Siew Hoong at a ceremony in December, in the presence of Education Minister Ong Ye Kung.

11 November 2019

Ms Lydia Tow, 25. studied psychological science at the Singapore campus of James Cook University. The insights she gleaned into human behaviour during her bachelor’s degree programme would later prove useful in her job as a creative copywriter and content developer at the creative agency Mills Design.

Ms Tow says: “I’ve always been naturally curious and interested in the why — why people perceive, think and act a certain way — so when I got the idea in my head that I wanted to study psych, it was going to happen, one way or another. Psychology is about perception, persuasion and cognition, among many other things.”

The 2018 graduate says that being able to understand the motivations of her clients’ target audiences allows her to broadly predict how they are likely to react to certain ideas.

She says: “As to exactly why I chose to pursue a career as a creative, I suppose this harks back to my love of books, creative storytelling and Disney films. So somewhere during the course of my undergraduate studies, I got lured by this siren call of wanting to create something just as engaging and capable of moving people.”

As a psychology student at JCU, she even wrote a thematic analysis on Disney princesses. Going beyond the romantic storyline, she examined the media’s influence on the formation of gender identity in children, as well as the changing role of women as seen through the lens of the Disney princesses, both classic and contemporary.

09 November 2019

Raffles Girls’ School students, along with 180 staff members and 150 invited guests, participated in the recent opening of RGS’ new campus at 2 Braddell Rise.

Now, RGS is connected to Raffles Institution at Bishan via an overhead pedestrian bridge linking bus stops on both sides of Braddell Road.

The RGS project took a total of 7 years and cost $90 million. It was co-funded by the school and the Ministry of Education (MOE).

RGS principal and alumna Poh Mun See, 50, said she was glad to have been part of this chapter of the school’s journey. She has helmed RGS since the end of 2012 and will step down in December to return to MOE as a cluster superintendent.

While the new campus is about 2.5ha larger than the old one in Anderson Road, Mrs Poh said the intake of Sec 1 students next year would remain constant at about 400.

The school has plans to expand a mentorship programme that matches RGS students with pupils of schools in the area. The school is also considering offering the Raffles Scholarship, alongside RI. The scholarship requires one-to-one matching for funds from donors.

05 November 2019

A building and a road at Nanyang Technological University have been renamed to mark the contributions of Singaporean pioneers to the development of our local education system.

The building that houses the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at NTU has been renamed the Singapore Hokkien Huay Kuan (SHHK) Building, while Nanyang Valley, a road adjacent to the Chinese Heritage Centre, will be renamed as the Tan Lark Sye Walk.

NTU president Subra Suresh said: “(The local communities’) legacy should not be forgotten by future generations of Singaporeans, even as we revel in the progress that Singapore has made in her education journey, with two top-ranked universities that are among the world’s best, and a strong research, innovation and education ecosystem.”

The SHHK Building and Tan Lark Sye Walk are next to the Chinese Heritage Centre. The nearby Yunnan Garden is being refurbished and will become an educational and recreation hub for students and the public. It will open by the first quarter of next year.

30 October 2019

The Singapore University of Technology and Design will be offering students from low-income families a new tuition grant and bursary award, which will commence from the academic year starting May 2020.

Charity Quantedge Foundation has contributed $3 million to seed-fund one of the grants. The Quantedge Foundation-SUTD Education Opportunity Grant guarantees that every incoming undergraduate who is in need of financial help will not have to pay tuition fees.

SUTD said there is no limit to the number of students who can benefit from the education opportunity grant. Whoever meets the eligibility criteria, and has applied for it, will get it.

The grant is primarily for students who come from families with a monthly per capita household income of $690 and below. They would be residing in a four-room type Housing Board flat or smaller, and would not have immediate family members who own private property.

At the same time, SUTD also announced a new Global Excellence Scholarship for those interested in pursuing postgraduate studies. It covers the full undergraduate tuition fees, among other costs.

Students should apply for the scholarships and financial aid when they apply for admission to SUTD next year.