IMPROVED PROCESSES BUT NEW EXPECTATIONS
In a joint statement to CNA, representatives from Singapore’s four teachers’ unions noted that educators generally agree that MOE’s measures have been helpful in specific areas – for instance, grading is faster and paperwork is less onerous.
Teachers CNA spoke to highlighted the Parents Gateway online platform, which has made collecting consent forms and medical certificates slightly smoother; as well as artificial intelligence tools for writing testimonials, which have saved time.
But these measures have not dramatically lowered teachers’ overall workload, as aspects such as task mix or intensity may have shifted, and teachers also often use freed-up time for more value-added work, said the Singapore Teachers’ Union, Singapore Chinese Teachers’ Union, Singapore Malay Teachers’ Union and Singapore Tamil Teachers’ Union.
“From a policy perspective, this shifts effort to higher-impact activities, but teachers may still feel their workload is as heavy as before,” said the unions. “Many would argue that the core pressures of the job – long hours, numerous responsibilities – remain unchanged.”
The OECD survey, done in 2024, found that the amount of time Singapore teachers spend on admin work has remained the same since 2018, at four hours per week. The amount of time spent marking dropped by 1.1 hours from 2018, but time spent on lesson planning increased by 0.9 hours.
While teachers no longer have to collect and collate forms manually, calling parents who do not submit the necessary forms one by one, sometimes repeatedly, is still unavoidable, they shared.
“These are time-consuming, manual tasks that technology still can’t alleviate,” Heidi said.
And one new source of administrative work has come from organising events or activities outside of the classroom, teachers said.
Renald, who has been a teacher for more than 10 years, noted that these are part of key performance indicators. For example, for teachers to be promoted, they need to show that they have led a team, which they can do so through planning events.
At one school he taught at, teachers and members of a parent support group planned recess activities every one to two weeks. Each event took up “a lot of time” – even a 30-minute activity requires days and weeks of planning, said Renald, who teaches English and mathematics at the primary school level.
“Is it possible to streamline the activities, for MOE to put a foot down and say ‘we’re not event planners, we shouldn’t be planning a thousand events for our students’?”
He added: “Honestly, most of my time is not spent on creating lessons or marking. It’s every other thing that’s taking up all my time, including all the meetings I have to get to.”
