A lot of parents are offering comfort based on the system they went through, to a child who is not in it. Knowing which system your child is actually in changes what is worth saying.
What replaced what
Streaming into Express, Normal Academic and Normal Technical ended for new cohorts with the 2024 Secondary 1 intake. In its place, Full Subject-Based Banding assigns students to one of three posting groups, G1, G2 or G3, based on PSLE results. The posting group sets the level a student begins each subject at, and from there students move up or down subject by subject according to how they do.
The O and N level examinations are being replaced by the Singapore-Cambridge Secondary Education Certificate, with the first results issued in 2027.
Both systems are running right now
In 2026 the two run in parallel. A student who entered secondary school in 2023 or earlier is finishing under the old system and will sit O or N levels. A student who entered in 2024 or later is under Full Subject-Based Banding and heading for the new certificate.
This is worth checking before a conversation at home, because the reassurance that fits one does not fit the other. Telling a G2 student that they can still transfer streams describes a mechanism that no longer exists for them, and telling a 2023-entry student about subject-level mobility describes one they do not have.
What changed for the better
A student who is strong in one subject and weak in another is no longer sorted as a whole person on the strength of a single set of results at twelve. Mobility is per subject and it runs both ways. Classes mix students taking subjects at different levels, which dilutes the labelling that streaming produced.
What did not change
The PSLE still determines the starting point. Sorting still happens, it is just finer grained. And the thing that generates most of the pressure in Singapore households is not the architecture of the system but the weight placed on where it puts you, which no ministry can legislate away.
Nobody has measured whether the change has moved the pressure. The third Singapore Mental Health Study covers academic stress for the first time and has lowered its age floor to 15, but it collects data until August 2027, so an answer is a few years off.
What is worth saying at home
That the posting group is a starting point rather than a verdict, which is now literally true. That you have noticed how hard they are working. And, if it is true, that your view of them does not move with their results, said plainly rather than implied, because children in this system are unusually good at detecting the implication that it does.
If the pressure has tipped into something else, the routes are on school and exam pressure.
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