Summarized from Straits Times
02 December 2014
SINGAPORE – Textbooks used in Singapore schools have been held up as examples of teaching excellence by a British minister, who is pushing for Britain to adopt high-quality textbooks to raise the country’s academic standards.
In a speech last month on the importance of good textbooks, British School Reform Minister Nick Gibb described Singapore’s textbooks as “excellent” and “state of the art”, and noted approvingly that England’s new network of maths hubs will start using textbooks based on Singapore’s “world-class primary maths textbooks”.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who shared the speech on his Facebook page on Monday, said it was “nice to know that other countries thought highly” of Singapore.
But he added: “We cannot rest on our laurels. We must continue improving our education system, to give our children the best start in life.”
Mr Gibbs also praised Singapore’s secondary school mathematics textbooks as having “a clear structure, strong explanations of key ideas, helpful worked examples and plenty of opportunity for essential practice to increase fluency and understanding”.
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