I wanted to post this in the forums but couldn’t because I was having problems with embedding pictures.  Anyway, I have fully ported my P1 Registration database from 2006-2021 to mysql, and one of the first things I did was to look at the competition over the years.

I looked at the Phase 2A1 status for the CHIJ family of schools.  It has definitely increased, at least amongst the “popular” schools.

The not so popular ones are: CHIJ (Kellock), CHIJ Our Lady Of Good Counsel, CHIJ Our Lady Of The Nativity, and CHIJ Our Lady Queen Of Peace.  These have at most 1 applicant in the last 2 years, and most have none at all.  So it seems that nothing much has changed for these schools in the last 15 years.

However, this is not true for other schools.  The key contributors to the chart are: CHIJ (Katong), CHIJ (Toa Payoh) and the most popular CHIJ St. Nicholas’ Girls.

As you can see from the graph, there has been an inexorable increase over the years, from around 50+ in 2006, all the way to 140+ this year in 2021.  So from this small slice of data, we can see that MOE’s attempts at convincing us that “all schools are good schools” have not really been effective.  People are still crowding the popular schools, and the intensity is still growing, while there is hardly any change for the less popular schools.  The funny thing is, this is happening with a lower birthrate in the recent years!

Why is this happening?  Why are people still going for the popular schools despite MOE’s policy at removing any information pertaining to the schools’ academic results, etc?  It seems that MOE has decided to stop pushing the “all schools are good schools” narrative and simply increase balloting requirements for young kids for P1 registration and even for Secondary 1 entries.

https://www.kiasuparents.com/kiasu/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=93775&start=260