Best Schools In Singapore For Locals and Expats (2024)
By Justin Huang
Thu, Feb 2, 2023 9:51am
8 min
8 min
Parenthood often means thinking three steps ahead. Education is one of the major milestones in a child’s development and getting them into a good educational institution remains one of the foremost priorities for parents.
Consistently positioned within the top five in the PISA Education rankings worldwide, Singapore is synonymous with being the premier education hub within the Southeast Asian region. The reputation of Singapore’s educational offerings brings forth large swathes of children of the regional elite prepared to spend to enrol them into the top schools in Singapore. This in part has also led to Singapore instituting distance-based admissions for junior schools because of the competitiveness as well as a desire to reduce travel times to school for students.
Distance-based criteria is only relevant for admission into local primary schools, and future students enrolling must be residing within a 1km radius of the school that they are intending to study at. To this end, the core of the elite junior schools still are concentrated in the areas of Districts 9,10 and 11, along the Bukit Timah Stretch.
Here’s our pick of the top 10 list of Best Schools across a range of qualities that they boast.
Anglo-Chinese School (ACS) (Primary/Junior)
This Anglo-Chinese School is famous for being name-dropped in Kevin Kwan’s movie-adapted book, Crazy Rich Asians. Its aim is to produce “gentlemen, scholars, leaders, officers and global citizens”, and the all-boys school has done so by counting at least three ministers in the current Singaporean Government among their alumni, as well as prominent business leaders such as Mr Phillip Ng of Singapore’s largest real estate developer Far East Organisation and members of the Shaw family. As one of the oldest schools in Singapore, its alumni extend deep into the generational networks of the old money in Singapore. For those seeking valuable connections for their child as they grow, this is one school to keep on your list.
Location: 50 Barker Road(Primary), 16 Windest Road (Junior), District 11 (Primary), District 10 (Junior)
Singapore Chinese Girls School (SCGS)
Situated right beside Anglo Chinese School Primary, the Singapore Chinese Girls’ School caters to the well-heeled crowd in the Newton Catchment Area. The provenance of its name speaks of its age and establishment as the first Chinese girls’ school in Singapore. SCGS Primary is known for producing alumni such as Mdm Halimah Yacob, the current and eighth president of Singapore. It is a non-denominational school. However, schools do not prejudice admissions based on faith and religion and participation in the school’s faith-based activities are by choice. SCGS has a secondary school section that gives it affiliation points off the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE), as well as further affiliation to a pre-university institution, Eunoia Junior College.
Location: 190 Dunearn Road, District 11
Methodist Girls School (MGS Primary)
Even though MGS Primary is not located beside ACS Primary like SCGS, as a Methodist school, it is the sister school to the ACS. It is located slightly further down the road, in District 21, and like ACS, it boasts similar networking qualities that your child may stand to gain from. While it is not a specialised school for academics nor sports, MGS performs well in all domains and students develop and excel holistically, with alumni such as the late Kwa Geok Choo, the wife of the late founding Prime Minister Mr Lee Kuan Yew to Southeast Asian Games swimming gold medallists Joscelin Yeo and Nicolette Teo.
Location: 11 Blackmore Drive, District 21
Nanyang Primary School
Nanyang Primary School is nestled within a large cluster of desirable bungalow estates, the ‘creme de la creme’ of private real estate purchases you can make in Singapore. Many notable local celebrities like singer Stefanie Sun and prominent politicians, like Senior Minister Tharman Shamnugaratnam have sent their children to Nanyang. In fact, the current Prime Minister, Mr Lee Hsien Loong, studied at Nanyang Primary. Its illustrious alumni coupled with its reputation as the leading institution for bilingual education makes it a prime choice to plan for your child’s future enrolment. Bungalows in the area cost upwards of $20 million. However, this does not mean that proximity-based admission is exclusive to those that buy them, as there are plenty of decently priced apartments in the vicinity. For example, D’Leedon is an architecturally renowned apartment complex within a 0.71km radius of Nanyang Primary. One of the furthest apartments within the 1km radius limit is Leedon Residence, a luxury boutique apartment built in 2015, while one of the cheapest options available within the area is Spanish Village, though the cheapest apartment available is still a sizeable S$2.63 million.
Location: 52 King’s Road, District 10
Raffles Girls Primary School
Named after the colonial founding father of Singapore, Sir Stamford Raffles, the institution’s senior divisions are famed for producing scholars including Mr Lee Kuan Yew. Raffles Girls Primary School is a junior institution popular among parents not just for its coveted name, but its high academic standards, having produced consistent highest scorers in the PSLE. While the ministry has shied away from proactively ranking schools based on academic performance and has instead pivoted to labelling all schools as “good schools” in line with the government’s meritocratic ideals, RGPS has an extensive teaching resource accumulated over the years and teaching staff that gives students a solid grounding in academic capability.
Location: 21 Hillcrest Road, District 11
Tao Nan School
Moving away from the Bukit Timah stretch of primary schools, Tao Nan School is one of the few schools that admitted Gifted Education Programme (GEP) students into their existing cohort. The Gifted Education Programme caters to the top 1% of the cohort and is aimed at further advancing students able to manage the academic rigour with more thought-based research projects. Selection for GEP generally happens in the middle of primary education at Primary 3, however, admission into the school at P1 is not a guarantee of admission into the program. Despite this, given that the teachers in the school are equipped with the resources to teach GEP students, this may translate to a better quality of education in one of the better educational institutions located in the East of Singapore.
Location: 49 Marine Crescent, District 15
Pei Hwa Presbyterian School
Pei Hwa Primary is a Presbyterian denominational school that has been accorded the Special Assistance Plan (SAP) since 1992. An SAP school “capitalises on its distinctiveness in its promotion and inculcation of Chinese values culture and tradition”. Pei Hwa has an Arts and Bi-cultural Enrichment program that deepens students’ appreciation of cultural goals. It is also a school with a long history, established in 1889, and is one of the schools along the Bukit Timah stretch that deviates from traditional sport-based Co-Curricular Activities such as Rugby and Swimming, instead having Chinese Dance and Chinese Drum as one of their anchor activities to reinforce a sense of cultural belonging and understanding at a young age. It’s a good choice for expat parents with Chinese roots looking to improve their child’s ability in bilingualism and enhance cultural appreciation.
Location: 7 Pei Wah Ave, District 21
Red Swastika School
Like Pei Hwa Presbyterian, Red Swastika School is also a SAP school, located in the East of Singapore rather than in the West/Central region. It also has consistent batches of students achieving an almost 100% pass rate in the PSLE, attesting to its ability to develop and nurture academic qualities in its students and has also been ranked by KiasuParents, a forum-blog on Singaporean education, as having one of the hardest Preliminary examination papers for the PSLE.
Location: 350 Bedok North Ave 3, District 16
Catholic High School (Primary Section)
Catholic High School boasts having the current Prime Minister of Singapore as one of its alumni (though he only enrolled at the secondary level), and the institution’s qualities can be best explained by PM Lee’s speech at the 80th Anniversary of the School just two months ago.
“They (the elder Mr Lee and Mdm Kwa) explained to me they chose it because it was a Chinese-medium school but it has high standards of both English and Chinese — bilingual. Also, it has strict discipline. Furthermore, it was a Catholic mission school.”
Location: 9 Bishan St 22, District 20
Rosyth School
Established in 1956, Rosyth School, like Tao Nan was one of the first few GEP schools that the government established for higher academically performing students. Given that there are only nine GEP Schools in Singapore, students that qualify for admission into the program are given the choice of enrolling in each of the nine schools at Primary 4. However, most of the schools are usually located within Districts 10,11, 21. Rosyth, therefore, caters to eligible GEP students in the north and central of Singapore, while Tao Nan caters for the East. Rosyth’s plethora of academic resources could benefit students by leapfrogging their cohort in their academic pursuits.
Location: 21 Serangoon North Ave 4, District 19
Beyond that, here are also some other considerations that you may wish to consider when purchasing a property near these schools. Kanebridge News spoke with realtor Clement Lim to understand more about additional factors that may affect your child’s choice of admission.
Kanebridge News: Are PSF (per-square-foot) prices significantly higher in areas with good schools?
Clement Lim: Yes. In my view, the three most important features of any private property is its location. This is especially so in land-scarce Singapore. On this small island, a good residential location almost invariably means being near reputable schools. This effect is compounded because good schools in Singapore are usually clustered together.
The reason for high per-square-foot prices near top schools in Singapore is a simple reflection of behavioural psychology and a hearty dose of Singaporean Kiasu-ism (Read: elitism or; meritocracy). Affluent parents fight tooth and nail to send their children to some of the best enrichment and to the best schools and will pay any premium for the convenience of their children. Like a competitive bidding system, prices of residential properties near good schools are therefore driven up by Asian parents’ weighty expectations of their children.
Where successful parents and bright students go, it also enriches the locality of any neighbourhood. It’s simple economics: purchasing power centres around a particular area, e.g Cluny Court near the aforementioned elite-school cluster, and top merchants follow. As a realtor, the most common question I get from buyers is, ‘what good schools are near this property?’.
KN: When is the right time to invest/purchase a property for the purposes of relocating and garnering admission to a primary school?
CL: Generally, it is recommended to purchase a property near your intended school before your child registers for the school.
However, a concession allows you to register your child for primary school using the address of a yet-to-be-completed property you have purchased. The vacant possession date (which means the date on which you can move in) must be within 2 years of your child’s entry into Primary 1, which usually is before your child turns 7 years old. This is a tad more complicated as it will require certain documents from you such as a Letter of Undertaking warranting that you will move into a said new property, as well as a copy of the original Sales and Purchase Agreement. It is more troublesome, but doable.
Credit: You may get in touch with Clement, our realtor lead for this article, at +65 9159 2011.
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A haven for hedge-fund titans and Hollywood grandees, Greenwich is one of the world’s most expensive residential enclaves, where eye-watering prices meet unapologetic grandeur.
Their careers spanned the personal computing, internet and smartphone waves. But some older workers see AI’s arrival as the cue to exit.
By Lauren Weber & Ray A. Smith
Tue, Apr 7, 2026 4 min
4 min
Luke Michel has already lived through two technology overhauls in his career, first desktop publishing in the 1980s and online publishing later on. But AI? He’s had enough.
So when his employer, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, made an early-retirement offer to some staff last year, the 68-year-old content strategist decided to speed up his exit. Before, he had expected to work a couple more years.
“The time and energy you have to devote to learning a whole new vocabulary and a whole new skill set, it wasn’t worth it,” he said.
It isn’t that he’s shunning artificial intelligence—he is learning Spanish with the help of Anthropic’s Claude. But, at this point, he’s less than eager to endure all the ways the technology promises to upend work.
“I just want to use it for my own purposes and not someone else’s,” he said.
After rising for decades and then hovering around 40% in the 2010s, the share of Americans over 55 years old in the workforce has slipped to 37.2%, the lowest level in more than 20 years.
The financial cushion of rising home equity and stock-market returns is driving some of the decline, economists and retirement advisers say.
But for some older professionals, money is only part of the equation.
They say they don’t want to spend the last years of their career going through the tumult of AI adoption, which has brought new tools, new expectations and a lot of uncertainty.
Many people retire when key elements of their work lives are disrupted at once, said Robert Laura , co-founder of the Retirement Coaches Association and an expert on the psychology of retirement.
“Maybe their autonomy is being challenged or changed, their friends are leaving the workplace, or they disagree with the company’s direction,” he said.
“When two or three of these things show up, that’s when people start to opt out.”
“AI is a big one,” he adds. “It disrupts their autonomy, their professionalism.”
Michel, whose work required overseeing and strategizing on website content, has been here before.
When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, he was a graphic designer using triangles and rubber cement.
The internet’s arrival changed everything again. Both developments required new skills, and he was energized by the challenge of learning alongside colleagues and peers.
It felt different this time around. “Your battery doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to,” he said.
He would rather spend his energy volunteering, making art, going to operas and chairing the Council on Aging in North Andover, Mass., where he lives.
In an AARP survey last summer of 5,000 people 50 and over, 25% of those who planned to retire sooner than expected counted work stress and burnout as factors.
About half of those retired said they had left work at least partly because they had the financial security to do so.
In general, older Americans are less likely than younger counterparts to use AI, research shows.
About 30% of people from ages 30 to 49 said they used ChatGPT on the job, nearly double the share of those 50 and older, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 adults.
Baby boomers and members of Generation X also experienced the sharpest declines in confidence using AI technology, according to a ManpowerGroup survey of more than 13,900 workers in 19 countries.
“We as employers aren’t doing a good enough job saying (to older workers), we value the skills that you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better,” says Becky Frankiewicz , ManpowerGroup’s chief strategy officer.
Jennifer Kerns’s misgivings about AI contributed to her departure last month from GitHub, where the 60-year-old worked as a program manager.
Coming from a family of artists, she said, it offends her that AI models train on the creative work of people who aren’t compensated for their intellectual property. And she worries about AI’s effect on people’s critical-thinking skills.
So she was dismayed when GitHub, a Microsoft-owned hosting service for software projects, began investing heavily in AI products and expecting employees to incorporate AI into much of their work. In employee-engagement surveys, the company had begun asking them to rate their AI usage on a scale of 1 to 5.
When it came time to write reports and reviews, colleagues would suggest that she use ChatGPT.
“I’d be like, ‘I have no idea how to use that and I have no interest in using AI to write anything for me,’” she said.
It would have been more prudent to work until she was closer to Medicare eligibility, she said. But by waiting until her children were out of college and some of her stock grants had vested, the math worked.
Her first act as a nonworking person: a solo trip to Scotland, where she took a darning workshop and learned how to repair sweaters.
“The opposite of AI,” she said.
Employers already under pressure to cut workers—such as in the tech industry—may welcome some of these retirements, said Gad Levanon , chief economist at Burning Glass Institute, which studies labor-market data.
“The more people retire, the fewer they have to let go,” he said.
Some of the savviest tech users are also balking at sticking around for the AI upheaval. Terry Grimm, who worked in IT for 40 years, retired from his senior software consultant role at 65 last May.
His firm had just been acquired by a bigger firm, which meant learning and integrating the parent company’s AI and other tech tools into his work.
Until then, Grimm expected he might work a couple more years, though he felt that he probably had enough saved to retire.
“I just got to the point where I was spending 40 hours at work and then 20 hours training and studying,” said Grimm, who has since moved with his wife from the Dallas area to a housing development on a golf course in El Dorado, Ark.
“I’m like, ‘I’ll let the younger guys do this.’”
