Singapore is an improbable success story in the design and implementation of education reforms that transformed a small, resource starved port into a nation, indispensable to first the region, then globally. This chapter illustrates policy formulation and implementation challenges in unifying a school system that had been segmented by media of instruction to aid rapid and transformative industrialisation. It refers to the successes in enhancing access to education and the difficulties posed by hasty and poorly implemented policy of school bilingualism and documents how these were overcome. This globally oriented system embraced choice, competition and branding and changed curricular and pedagogic frameworks, enhanced TVET, re-positioned the universities and upgraded teacher education. While this has underpinned a system which ranks highly in all international comparisons of educational quality, the policies and practices are not a package or simple formula for others to embrace, they are a product of time and place and are likely to change as Singapore looks to the future.

Chapter 5 evaluates the role of education in China’s rapid growth. In 1980, China was one of the poorest countries in the world, but the average years of schooling of its adult population was already near that of a middle-income country. This relatively high educational level was an advantage for China’s economic development. However, this advantage all but disappeared by 2005. China’s greatest advantage turns out to be in the quality rather than quantity of education. According to the cognitive skills index produced by Eric Hanushek and his coauthors, who use it as a measure of a country’s educational quality, China ranks the best among all developing nations. This factor alone may explain a very significant 4 percentage point difference in GDP per capita growth between China and developing countries such as Peru and South Africa. It is shown that China’s advantage in the quality of schooling is not due to more investment in education by the government. Instead, it is the traditional Confucian culture that has made people in China and other East Asian economies influenced by the culture value of education more than people in most other developing countries.