Submitted by ChiefKiasu

Apologies for the mistake we made.  Here is the corrected version of the article.

This year, Ministry of Education is experimenting with a new reporting interface, which is great for personal usage, but terrible for people who want to make sense of the data.  It took some getting used to, and we made a mistake thinking that the numbers included the 40 reserved places.  As corrected by some kind readers, we realised our mistake and we are redoing the article.

Regardless, here is what we think of the numbers.

First, the good news.  We welcome Valour Primary to the mix, giving us a total of 185 Primary schools.  Now, the bad news.  With few exceptions, all schools drop between 8 to 90 places (5 schools: Ahmad Ibrahim, Teck Whye, Chua Chu Kang, Lakeside and Cedar are the only schools which increased by 1 class of students), with the average loss of about 15 places per school.  Granted that this year are for students after the traditional hot Year of the Dragon, the downturn is not surprising. The overall cohort is 39,058 vacancies, versus the generous 41,820 places last year.  That marks a rather modest drop of 2,762 vacancies from last year.

We are arranging a new way to looking at the numbers this year.  We publish the 2019 percentage of remaining places and compared it with the 2018 percentage at the same stage of the exercise (Phase 1).  A positive value indicates that the school has “more” places this year compared with last year (yay!).  The table below is sorted within the listed area, from the smallest to the biggest.

For example, there is a bit of good news for those targeting Red Swastika Primary in Bedok as the take-up rate is up 13.75% compared to last year at the same stage.

Click on chart to enlarge