The Real Reason Why There Used to be Primary 8 in Singapore

The Blue Cats' Instagram:   / singaporethebluecats   Before 1979, Singapore's education system had high dropout rates, with only about two-thirds of primary school students progressing to secondary school. Many children failed exams and left school early to help with household expenses. A report by Deputy Prime Minister Goh Keng Swee identified key problems: students speaking dialect at home struggled with English and Mother Tongue learning, and the rigid system couldn't accommodate different learning abilities. To address these issues, Singapore introduced the New Education System (NES) with streaming for both primary and secondary levels in 1979. Primary school students were divided into three streams after Primary 3: the normal stream (6-year primary education), extended bilingual stream (studying until Primary 8 for those who passed Primary 2 but failed Primary 3), and monolingual stream (focusing on basic literacy and numeracy, also until Primary 8). This confirmed that Primary 7 and Primary 8 did exist in Singapore's education system. In 1991, the primary school streaming system was changed to EM1, EM2, and EM3, where "EM" stood for English and Mother Tongue. EM1 was for students proficient in both languages as first languages, EM2 for those using English as first language and Mother Tongue as secondary, and EM3 for students using English as first language with basic Mother Tongue literacy. There was also ME3, which prioritized Mother Tongue over English. With this change, all primary students studied only until Primary 6. Despite controversy over social stratification, the streaming system successfully reduced dropout rates and established Singapore's reputation as a leading educational system. However, after 45 years, Singapore gradually eliminated streaming - removing it from primary schools in 2008 and secondary schools from 2024 onwards. The system now uses subject-based banding, essentially returning to a more flexible approach similar to the pre-1979 era.