The GEP programme started in 1984 as a means to allow every student to learn at his or her own pace, in line with the New Education System promoted by the Ministry of Education, amidst public criticisms which carried on till present. To me, I feel that although GEP promotes elitism, it is the best education strategy given Singapore's past and current situation.

Singapore has always been lacking in physical resources and she can only depend on her own citizens. Sadly, most top talents in Singapore prefer to search for greener pastures overseas, resulting in a 'brain drain' problem. To solve this problem, the government has been encouraging foreign talents to come to Singapore. Although there is a large influx of foreign talents as it will make us politically and economically vulnerable and is only a short term solution. On the other hand, GEP is a double edged sword. Firstly, GEP serves to fully develop and utilise local academic talents and to groom them to undertake professional and research jobs locally, thus benefitting Singapore's economy in research and development. Secondly, GEP students are less likely to search for greener pastures elsewhere because they had been taught to appreciate Singapore for identifying and grooming them for their future and also the jobs offered for GEP students are among the best available jobs in Singapore. In this way, the problem of brain drain would be solved effectively.

Moreover, GEP students are among the top 1% of the whole of Singapore. By grouping them together, it stimulates competition and accelerating learning. It is also necessary to do so because if these students are left to study among mainstream students, they will tend to do much better than their mainstream counterparts. This would inevitably create complacency among such students, who think that they can pass with flying colours even though they had been slacking throughout. As a Confucianistic society, the only ticket to success in Singapore's education system is to work harder than others, since hardwork is always paramount over intelligence. Therefore, GEP seeks to prevent academic elites from thinking that they can excel by pure intelligence, because they are placed in an environment with people of the same calibre as them, causing lessons and assessments to be of a much higher level and causing GEP students to attain a lower score than mainstream tests.

However, while I agree with GEP grooming elites, I am concerned about the social stigma and division by introducing GEP. Since the selection test for GEP was carried out in Primary 3, all the country's top 1% academic elites are singled out when they were only Primary 3, when they are enjoying their childhood and most of them wading in childhood innocence. Presently, we are neglecting other potential academic elites by placing the selection test so early in their education years. We need to bear in mind that not all students can show their academic talents at a tender age of 9. Hence, it is integral that we provide opportunities to enter such people at a later stage of their education years. Not too long ago, MOE has scraped the GEP intake at Primary 6 because most students could not catch up with the accelerated programme in GEP. Therefore, I would propose that GEP be open to everybody and not lock those academic elites indentified at Primary 3 inside this programme. GEP should open its doors to accept any student who can prove himself or herself to be able to integrate into the accelerated programme and to survive in it, while current GEP students should also be given the absoute autonomy to opt out of the programme at any time if their results show that they cannot cope in the programme.

Besides, since GEP is seen as the best possible avenue to success in life, students and parents tend to get over anxious about obtaining a place in GEP. This causes unnecessary competition that does not benefit the student nor the parent at all. For the student, when he or she should be focusing on trying out new things (school acts as a cushion for failures), the student rather places importance on getting into the GEP, which may cause foul play in the worst case scenario, resulting in dire social impact, because the following generations of students will lose more and more of their childhood, being unable to enjoy their childhood years. For parents, they will compete against each other, striving to get their child into the GEP. In turn, the negative consequence of this balls down the the students themselves, as parents bog them down with tuitions after tuitions, giving them no room to pursue their childhood activities. This finally causes an unhealthy society which is detrimental to Singapore as a whole. As such, the government should stress that GEP is not the best way to attain success, but rather an arena for academic elites to learn at their suitable pace. The biggest challenge in this method is to overcome the inferiority complex between GEP and mainstream students.

In conclusion, GEP is a necessary evil, given Singapore's current economic, social and political circumstances. Of course the ideal case would be equal education for everybody, but it is simply not possible to achieve that in Singapore's Confucianistic and meritocratic education system. Rather, we can work towards the ideal scenario by allowing GEP to be an open doored programme, allowing students to enter and leave the programme more freely, instead of locking them up in the programme after a few months in GEP.