Northlight School

Posted at July 19, 2008

As part of my PSC Predeparture Course (PDC), I was posted to Northlight School as a teacher-attachee for 4 days. This school is very, very, very remarkable


The old Broaderick Sec School Building given a new lease of life, just like the kids at Northlight School

Northlight School is a school which takes in children who have failed (badly; below 50/300 points) the PSLE, and are put through a 4 year course which emphasizes character education along with vocational skills. From there, the top performers move on to ITE; the others use the skills they have picked up to enter the workforce.

The school has about 680 children. These children aren’t your everyday angels; these are (in someone else’s words) “taking the trouble kids from every primary school in the island and putting them into one school building”. By all standards Northlight School should be a school full of fights, absentees, and all sorts of trouble behavior. But it isn’t.

The school has done something very fantastic with these kids; most of these kids have gone from school troublemakers to model students, others have turned from perennial school absentees to enthusiastic students who come every day (even during holidays!). Most of all it has turned them from (otherwise termed) Youth-At-Risk to well behaved students who in all likelihood will be good citizens in the future.

I don’t know how they’ve done it, but in my 4 days there I’ve had a few glimpses of how it got done. All I can do is post up the pictures I’ve taken, and caption them. Through them you’ll see how Northlight has done its “minor miracle”, and perhaps should be an inspiration to all schools.

First Impressions

The first sight that you notice in Northlight is how neat it is. There isn’t any litter around, and is very brightly colored. Ms. Chua Yen Ching, the principal, told me that “the color scheme was the most important” and that the neatness and decor of a school was very important.


The school is neat, clean and cheerfully coloured

Standard Facilities with a Twist: Canteen, Library


Board Games, Carom Boards and Xbox machines in the canteen for students to use


The school’s Xboxes reduce the need for the kids to go to arcades to play games, lessening one bad influenc


The library is unsurprisingly small; most students have a reading ability of a Primary 1 student or less.

Vocational Programmes

What was remarkable about Northlight was its vocational Programmes. Similar to the ITEs, the school had full fledged facilities to train people in retail, food preparation, and engineering


The school’s mockup of a hotel room, complete with TV, bed, and…


… cleaning trolley!


F&B: Students are attending a lesson on sauces


F&B: students learn the finer aspects of running a restaurant


F&B: Teachers come up with interesting ways to teach students. Here, students learn how to “kiap” and serve food by practicing using ping-pong balls in friendly competition. First one with an empty plate wins…


Retail: Mockup of a grocery store; students are at the front attending a lesson on accounting


Mechanical Engineering class in session. Classes are generally very small, with small teacher-student ratios.

Northlight’s special features:

Northlight turns education into something more fun, with many other programmes. Unsurprisingly, it has managed to turn previously unethusiastic students into enthusiastic students.


Art class: the school emphasizes art in their curriculum, in the belief that it allows students to express themselves as a form of therapy.


I find it quite amazing to grasp the fact that almost every student in Northlight can paint really well


New Media Classroom: students learn how to use AV equipment. This picture is of the broadcasting booth of the school’s own radio station


New Media Classroom: the green wall is a “virtual wall” which is used for shooting video; kids then learn how to do video editing using the computers


Smartboards: innovative touchscreen that has helped students go from “hating math” to liking math. Northlight has 22 of them, most of them in everyday classrooms.


Computer labs: use mac!! (sorry couldn’t resist)


Black Box: fully equipped drama studio for drama lessons.


Music studio: Most music lessons emphasize the need for teamwork, so kids play stuff like angklong orchestra, which needs everyone involved.


Lesson on blogging. Kids learn how to blog!


CCAs: Kids have CCA twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays


Fully equipped gym with treadmills, freemotion weights, etc


Recreation room: to discourage kids from going to arcades and lan shops, the school has its own arcade and lan shop within school. After school, it is pure havoc in there.


Recreation room 2 has its pool tables and flatscreen LCD TVs (other side of the room). !!!!


A shot of the school programme: Kids get to go for OBS, and a group is going to Malacca. Learning journeys and non-traditional learning activities abound


Bread Basket: free bread for students who cannot afford food. Most of the students in Northlight come from the bottom few percent of the income spectrum, and many come from broken families or are orphans


School Timetable: every day lasts till late in the afternoon, to keep the kids of the streets. They are also too eager to stay in school; most of them have unhappy homes to return to, and school represents a refuge of fun and friends for them


The school does community service in Laos, as well as in the nearby Dakota Crescent. To the kids, community involvement weans them off the impression that they need to be helped; rather they are empowered as useful citizens in society, capable of making a difference


School Assembly: students are much better behaved there than in many other schools I have been to, although they very obviously aren’t interested in whatever is going on


This is immensely cute: This is used to teach kids how to mop in a zig-zag fashion from left to right. The school teaches them basic household skills as well!

Some small things I observed:

There is an immense amount of optimism and encouragement in the school. Nothing says it more than this notice, which was put up on the carom board:


Sign which in one paragraph encapsulates the spirit of Northlight teachers

Moreover there is this cognizance that teachers, as much as students, are part of the whole process of bringing these kids up. All teachers at Northlight applied to be there, and I have never met a more dedicated bunch of teachers who possess an unnatural patience and sense of purpose in what they do. The job there is tough, and it is exactly what they signed up for. A quarter of them are mid-career switchers; the head of the F&B section used to set up restaurants, while the guy who sat opposite me was a Forex trader.


Teachers reflections: how many other schools would put up their teachers reflections for children to read?


Encouragement from the other parts of the civil service

However, there is always this knowledge that the kids they are dealing with have troubled backgrounds, and need to be monitored closely.


Security cameras track different places around school to prevent fights, and other crimes


The school’s water consumption and electrical bills: kids and teachers are encouraged to make the bills go down


Encouraging messages are everywhere from canteen tables to walls, etc

Northlight is one of the most innovative schools that I have seen, and it is so because it has had the resources to pour into its facilities. It is a showcase of the latest education technologies, all applied to perhaps the bottom few percent of our education system in order to ensure that they do not left behind. It is the manifestation of the government’s intent to ensure that the famous “xiao hai bu ben” criticism of the education system is rebutted; in my 4 days here I have never seen more given to these at-risk children to ensure that they are well taken care of by the system.

The photos I have put up here don’t do justice to what the school has done; there are many more photos which I’d like to put up, and many more which I wasn’t able to capture on film. Moreover the larger part of what Northlight does is character education, which can’t be put on photograph paper. More on that next time.

At a later date I will write my thoughts on how it has made it happen, and what have been its ingredients of change. One of these is the school’s principal, Ms. Chua Yen Ching, who I was attached to for the 4 days; another is the teachers and the system that they have come up with. Though my 4 day stint has been brief, I have been able to glimpse a very strong revolution that is taking place in schools, and bodes very well for the future.

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