School Leadership in Decentralized Centralism of Singapore Education

Abstract

The key challenge in Singapore education reforms centres on finding the right balance between centralization and decentralization. An offshoot from such balancing act is the necessity for school-based curriculum development and innovation, along with appropriate support for it. Primary among the support is instructional and/or curriculum leadership to support school-based curriculum development and innovation. Along with this is the necessity to enact distributed leadership to distribute or disperse instructional leadership to support school-based curriculum development and innovation. In this regard, teacher leadership emerges as the outcome of distributed leadership. Nurturing teacher leadership (formal and informal) thus becomes an essential next-phase development. There is therefore the need to develop leadership capacity and competencies to support the scaling up of school-based curriculum development and innovation. Notwithstanding the ideal positive direction, the challenges on the grounds to materialize the vision exist.