Indranee Rajah, the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office and Second Minister for Finance and Education, attended the 9th International Summit on the Teaching Profession (ISTP) in Helsinki, Finland.
Held from 14-15 March 2019, the ISTP intended to assemble ministers and authorities from countries and regions that have “high-performing or rapidly improving school systems” as measured by the results of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a global study aimed to evaluate educational systems by measuring scholastic performance on mathematics, science, and reading.
Indranee Rajah arrived Finland on March 12th and on the next day, she visited the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Educational Sciences.
During the University visit, the minister was informed about Finland’s study system by Professor Lasse Lipponen who gave a summary on university course for pre-school teachers and by Ms Riia Palmqvist, Counsellor of Education, Finnish National Agency for Education on the policy supporting student with special needs.
After that the minister and her delegation were off to the Merilahti comprehensive school. The visit highlighted on the school’s policies that support students with special educational needs and harmonize multicultural students from immigrant backgrounds.
On March14th, the first day of ISTP, Ministers and Teacher Union leaders discussed the following topics: Leading together focusing on how to develop school leaders and teacher leadership, building strong foundations through innovative pedagogy and the information exchange by counterparts from other countries.
On day two of ISTP, countries’ representatives were invited to set out three plans “Towards Sustainable Schools” for 2019.
According to Indranee Rajah, she outlined three priorities for Singapore that are: “Recalibration of an education system” by reducing school-based assessments to increase free time for student so that the students can learn and experience the joy of learning by themselves, 2. “Sustaining a high-quality teaching force” by supporting teacher’s professional development and leveraging technology to ensure that the students can learn anytime, anywhere, at their convenience and 3. “Strengthen the quality of pre-school education” by setting up foundation, courses, frameworks and researches “to provide a strong foundation for early childhood learning.”
“I would like to thank the Finnish government and their people for being such excellent hosts and also to congratulate them on a very successful conference.” Indranee wrote on her Facebook page.
