26 June 2022

The Ministry of Education has not seen any spike in teachers leaving the service during the past two years, countering worldwide trends of a “Great Resignation”.

Additionally, the annual attrition rate for the entire teacher population, which stands at about 32,000, remained stable at 2 per cent to 3 per cent in the past five years.

Madam Liew Wei Li, director-general of education at the Ministry of Education, said that about half of Singapore’s teaching workforce is aged 40 and below, and around 40 per cent of teachers are in their first 10 years of service.

Broadening teachers’ exposure to other industries is also the aim of MOE’s Teacher Work Attachment Plus Programme, which was announced last year, said Madam Liew.

26 June 2022

The National University of Singapore has been named Asia’s best university in the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) annual higher education ranking.

In the QS ranking released this month, NUS came in 11th globally, retaining its place from last year, while NTU took 19th place.

NUS has held the top position among Asian universities for the past five years.

QS evaluated the institutions on six indicators: academic reputation, reputation among employers, citations per faculty member, faculty to student ratio, ratio of international faculty members and ratio of international students.

14 May 2022

The Kent Ridge campus of the National University of Singapore will become a live test bed for low-carbon technology in a collaboration with Keppel Infrastructure.

Four projects have been chosen to jump-start the on-campus collaboration, which will be called the “low-carbon living laboratory”.

These projects include a hybrid power grid to ease the integration of renewable energy resources, novel electric vehicle charging strategies, district cooling systems and enhanced seawater desalination.

NUS deputy president for research and technology, Professor Chen Tsuhan, said: “The NUS Kent Ridge campus will serve as a vibrant living laboratory, where innovative solutions are tested in a realistic operational environment before they are deployed at a larger scale. These technological capabilities will in turn help enhance the climate resilience of our campuses.”

14 May 2022

Nanyang Technological University has set up the EcoLabs Digital Twin Co-Innovation Lab and the NTU-Arrow Invent Joint Lab to assist start-up companies that are focusing on green technology, and also assist Small and Medium Enterprises commercialise products.

The labs will help start-ups as well as SMEs refine and test their technology and connect them to larger companies to help them scale up.

The two labs began work last year and were launched under the EcoLabs Centre of Innovation for Energy programme, which is a collaboration by NTU, Enterprise Singapore and the Sustainable Energy Association of Singapore.

Minister of State for Trade and Industry Low Yen Ling said the EcoLabs programme is part of Singapore’s larger strategy to support start-ups and SMEs as they translate their technology into products on a commercial scale.

25 April 2022

According to the latest graduate employment survey recently released by SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG), about half of fresh graduates from Singapore’s private education institutions found full-time work within six months of completing their examinations.

Overall, 85.3 per cent of private university graduates found work, including part-time or freelance jobs.

However, the survey continued to find that job prospects for PEI graduates lag behind their peers from autonomous universities. The overall employment rate for fresh graduates from the 2021 cohort in autonomous universities was 94.4 per cent while the full-time permanent employment rate was 84 per cent.

The poll also showed that the median gross monthly salary of PEI fresh graduates in full-time jobs was $2,989.

11 April 2022

Education Minister Chan Chun Sing has revealed that about 45 per cent of pupils who joined the Gifted Education Programme (GEP) over the last five years live in Housing Board flats. In addition, the pupils selected for the GEP came from 60 per cent of Singapore’s primary schools.

Mr Chan said that schools offer a range of programmes for the diverse aptitudes and learning needs of their students, including various learning support programmes for low-progress students, as well as the GEP and school-based provisions for high ability learners in primary schools.

The GEP caters to the needs of intellectually gifted students. Pupils are identified for the programme through a two-stage exercise in Primary 3 and selected pupils are invited to join it in Primary 4.

30 March 2022

Five of Singapore’s university student unions have formed a new network called the Inter-University Network in order to collectively tackle issues concerning local undergraduates.

The network comprises the student union leaders from the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Management University and the Singapore University of Technology and Design, as well as Yale-NUS College. The network aims to bring the universities together and represent, protect and empower the interests of undergraduates and young people on a national level.

The Singapore University of Social Sciences and the Singapore Institute of Technology are not formally involved in the network as they do not have student unions, but the network will work with students from those two universities, beginning with its first initiative, UCare, which aims to understand mental health stressors among undergraduates. It will work with clubs and interest groups at the universities to look at existing prevention and intervention support for mental health problems, as well as identify possible gaps in these support systems.

30 March 2022

The Ministry of Defence and Nanyang Technological University have launched a new Digital Work-Learn Scheme to train selected full-time national servicemen in the area of digital defence.

The NSFs participating in the scheme will serve as digital specialists under the Singapore Armed Forces’s newly established Digital and Intelligence Service (DIS) for four years. They will develop artificial intelligence applications and perform software engineering tasks in support of real-world military operations.

These servicemen can take up modules to earn academic credits that count towards getting a degree in data science and AI, computer science or computer engineering. They will attend classes at NTU for one semester every year to prepare them for their roles in operational units.