Tuition Culture: The Unequal Playing Field

Singapore's reputation for academic excellence is real. So is what it takes to keep up. Households spent $1.8 billion on tuition in 2023 alone. For many students, private tuition has quietly stopped being a supplement and has become a prerequisite.

The problem is not that tuition exists, but what happens to students whose families cannot afford it. When most of a class has already covered material through tutors before the teacher even introduces it, the pace of instruction shifts to accommodate them. Students without that foundation do not just fall behind. They are being taught in a system that has already calibrated itself around their better-prepared peers.

The students left behind are not failing individually. The system around them was built for someone else. MOE has acknowledged this. Changes to the PSLE scoring system and the Direct School Admission scheme both signal a move away from purely academic benchmarks. Remedial lessons in schools address some of it, though not all. Outside government, organisations such as Loving Heart Jurong and Happy Tutors have established free tuition services specifically for underprivileged students.

Project Reperio, under The Unspoken Policy, is built on this belief: it shouldn't matter how much your parents can afford when it comes to academic support. Some things in the system are hard to move, and no individual effort alone will move them. That work belongs to policy.