The Special Assistance Plan (SAP; Chinese: 特别辅助计划; pinyin: Tèbié Fǔzhù Jìhuà) is a programme in Singapore introduced in 1979[1] which caters to academically strong students who excel in both their mother tongue as well as English.
To enter a SAP school, a student must achieve a PSLE aggregate score that puts him in the top 10% of his cohort, with an 'A' grade for both the Chinese and English (before AL).
This means that only a relatively small group of students who are academically and linguistically strong may enter a SAP school.
Some students, regardless of whether they are in a SAP school, are offered a chance at effective trilingualism in secondary education starting from age 13.
[9] The selected schools were given additional teaching resources and given assistance to run classes with a lower student-to-teacher ratio.
Economically, America appeared unable to compete with rising Asian manufacturing competitors, especially Japan and was facing budget deficits.
Singapore politicians from the dominant People's Action Party synthesised these various situations and developed certain ideas that came to be known as the Asian Values discourse.
According to this line of argument, Singapore, along with Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan, had succeeded so spectacularly in no small part because of their shared Confucianist cultural heritage, which emphasised values such as hard work, education, family unity, deference and loyalty to authority figures, community spirit (in contrast to Western individualism), etc.
The SAP school programme is periodically criticised in the national media by Singaporeans who are concerned about the ethnic segregation that it inevitably promotes.