The development of school autonomy in Singapore has been a graduated process, with the Ministry of Education (MOE) centralising controls in strategic directions and curriculum content, while empowering schools with autonomy in terms of tactical matters. To illustrate this dialectical interplay, the presentation will be divided into sections: (i) historical development of school autonomy in Singapore; (ii) system’s responses to 21st century learning; (iii) within and across schools’ re-contextualization efforts of national policies for pedagogical reforms. The presentation first outlines the evolutionary stance of Singapore’s decentralisation from its past to present trajectories, thus providing a broader social-historical interpretation to its education system; followed by situating the context of reform within the national narrative of 21st century competencies framework developed by MOE (MOE, 2014). Through two case studies of whole-school reforms, we examine how schools could negotiate the boundaries of unmovable local constraints (Thompson & Wiliam, 2008); leverage on systemic affordances and translate national policies into school-based curriculum innovations to nurture 21st century learners, both within and increasingly, across schools. We acknowledge that the two case studies may not be representative of Singapore’s education system but they allow in-depth discussion of how schools have leveraged on the nexus of “centralized-decentralization” (Ng, 2013; Chua, Hatch & Faughey, 2014) to enable reforms. Our proposition is that school autonomy should be accompanied by systemic affordances which promulgate capacity-building and coherence-making for sustainable results (Fullan, 2007; Toh et al., 2014). Promising pedagogical reforms should be proliferated to other schools, buttressed by an overarching healthy ethos for collaboration instead of competition. At the systems level, efforts have been made by MOE to: (i) develop learning networks for leaders and teachers to share and collaborate on pedagogical innovations at the national, zonal, cluster and school levels; (ii) provide socio-technical infrastructure to pool teaching resources and (iii) provide white space for reflectivity and tinkering. At the school level, leaders need to act as brokers to forge “critical connections” (Wheatley, 2006, p.45) within and across the subsystems of the education ecology for meaningful sense-making. Notwithstanding the variegated landscape for innovation, it is only when both the school and system’s needs are aligned that the “ecosystem carryover” (Adner, 2012) effect of school autonomy can be made plausible. Expounding on how schools can continue to build cultures of autonomy while balancing it with centralisation forces, we make attempts to articulate the larger relationship between school autonomy, leadership practices and student learning.

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