Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles is the founder of Singapore Institute which now known as Raffles Institution in 1823, that is the beginning of education in Singapore under the British rule. Subsequently, there are three types of school appeared in Singapore which is Malay schools, Chinese and Tamil schools as well as English centric schools. The main language of academic instruction in Singapore is English and officially appointed as the first language in 1987. Nevertheless, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil are still an official languages but as a second language and also learn in school as a “Mother Tongue” subject. Universal education for children of all races and background started to take shape and education system altered from quantity to quality. With differentiation of pupil’s academic abilities, they are classified into different streams according to their academic results to focus on academic excellence. The classification starts since Primary 4 level whereby students are sitting for their streaming exam at the end of their final semester and based on the results obtain by students, they will be split into EM1, EM2 and EM3. By this classification, teachers are able to understand the level of student capability if they could go in a fast pace or need more special attention and in which area.
This way, students are able to catch up and get the attention they need. EM1 is typically for those doing exceptionally well in their studies and able to catch up on topics very fast, they will be taught to be doing extra well and study a higher level of subjects (example; A-Mathematic or Higher Mother Tongue instead of the standard level). EM2 is the average level classes but still have different levels in its own stream such as there are 3 classes for EM2 but EM2 class one is able to learn slightly faster than the other two and average academic result of this class is better than the other two. For EM3, it can be consider as a special class as students of this class need more attention and usually are weak at the important three compulsory subjects but being the last class does not mean they are the weakest.