Education Reform and the Singapore Story - a Masterclass with Professor Pak Tee Ng

A slightly different episode for February half term - this is our reflection on a talk we attended in September which was presented by the Singaporean ITE specialist Professor Pak Tee Ng. An adviser to the Scottish government on their education reforms, the professor was making a quick trip to Wales to deliver a 'masterclass' entitled 'The Singapore Story'. Singapore is the world's highest-ranking education system according to the international PISA tests (with Wales considerably further down the list!) so we were eager to hear what he had to say, and we weren't disappointed. On returning from the talk back at the start of this academic year, we sat down and recorded a podcast episode with our thoughts, which was then promptly relegated to the 'we have no idea when to put this out' folder, and then became our unofficial 'emergency episode', to fill a gap if something went disastrously wrong with something else! More than four months later, with no sign of a podcast disaster, we decided that if we didn't release the episode soon it would be too old to use, so we hope you enjoy our belated reflections on the force of nature that is Professor Pak Tee Ng. If you'd like to read the Professor's book, it's 'Learning from Singapore: The Power of Paradoxes' published by Routledge. Enjoy!     ---------- This episode was recorded at Cardiff Metropolitan University's Cyncoed campus on 30th September 2019