IP Schools in Singapore: All 17, and Where Each One Leads

Search for "IP schools in Singapore" and you get seventeen names, usually alphabetical, usually with nothing attached to them. The names are the least useful part. Nine of the seventeen keep a student on the same campus for all six years; the other eight hand their students to a different school at the end of Year 4, which settles where your child sits their final exam, whose cohort they graduate with, and which campus they commute to at seventeen. Three of the seventeen end at the IB Diploma instead of the A-Level, and a fourth ends at a certificate no other school in the country awards. Almost none of that appears in the list.

This page is the list with those facts attached. It is written for P5 and P6 families deciding which schools to put on a Secondary 1 form or a DSA application, and for families already inside an IP wondering what the next four years look like. The prior question, whether the six-year route suits your child at all, belongs to a different article: the Integrated Programme, explained works through the tradeoffs. This one is the directory.

The seventeen schools, and where each one ends

Four of the boys' schools that keep their students for all six years turn co-educational in Years 5 and 6. At Anglo-Chinese School (Independent), Hwa Chong Institution and Raffles Institution, that is because the partner school's girls arrive on campus for the final two years. At St. Joseph's Institution it is because the pre-university section admits from the wider pool rather than from a sister school.

NUS High is the one row with no comparable way in. It stays out of the Secondary 1 Posting exercise altogether and fills its entire intake through Direct School Admission, on its own tests and on demonstrated work in Mathematics and Science, so there is no PSLE cut-off to set beside the other sixteen. Those sixteen open both doors: a posting cut-off of their own, among the most competitive in the country, and a DSA round. How to use either is its own subject, with its own guides: AL scoring and posting and our DSA-Sec guide.

Families compare these schools on reputation, and a ranking shows none of what follows. Start with the last column, which quietly does the most work. Thirteen of the seventeen lead to the Singapore-Cambridge GCE A-Level. Three lead to the IB Diploma: Anglo-Chinese School (Independent), St. Joseph's Institution, and Methodist Girls' School (Secondary) by way of ACS(I). NUS High School of Mathematics and Science awards its own NUS High School Diploma, which no other school in Singapore issues. Which of the three a school ends at sets what your child studies from Year 5 and how they are assessed. For Mathematics it decides something larger than syllabus content: the IB requires a Mathematics course of every candidate, and the A-Level does not.

Nine schools keep your child; eight hand them on

Eight of the seventeen run only Years 1 to 4 and pass their IP students to a partner institution for the last two. The four groupings:

• Catholic High School, CHIJ St. Nicholas Girls' School and Singapore Chinese Girls' School feed Eunoia Junior College in a four-school Joint Integrated Programme.
• Victoria School and Cedar Girls' Secondary School feed Victoria Junior College, an arrangement the three schools call the Victoria-Cedar Alliance.
• Nanyang Girls' High School feeds Hwa Chong Institution's college section, and Raffles Girls' School feeds Raffles Institution's.
• Methodist Girls' School (Secondary) feeds Anglo-Chinese School (Independent), which is why its IP ends at the IB rather than the A-Level.

For a family this settles concrete things: the commute in Years 5 and 6, the size and composition of the cohort your child graduates with, and whether "getting into school X" means six years there or four. It also changes the shape of the transition. A student who moves campus at the end of Year 4 goes through most of what an ordinary school change involves: new teachers, a new assessment culture, a merged cohort. The only thing missing is the exam. A student who stays put goes through none of it.

This is the split families are least likely to have seen coming. A school's final qualification is easy to find and gets asked about; the campus arrangement reads like an administrative footnote until Year 4 arrives. In eight of these seventeen cases, a family ranking choices on a Secondary 1 form is choosing a four-year school and, with it, a sixth form they may never have looked at.

You do not have to take our word for which is which. Look at the levels each school says it teaches: the nine that keep their students run right through to Junior College 2, and the eight that hand over stop at Secondary 4. Every school in the table above lines up with that rule.

Whole-cohort IP versus a parallel four-year track

Some of these schools put their entire Secondary 1 intake into the IP. Raffles Institution, Hwa Chong Institution and Dunman High School work this way: enrolling means joining the six-year programme, and there is no other track to be moved onto. Others run a separate four-year track alongside it, so a family can be at the school without being on the through-train. Anglo-Chinese School (Independent), St. Joseph's Institution and Methodist Girls' School (Secondary) each publish both, and at SJI the two tracks converge: a four-year student can apply to continue into the IB Diploma at SJI on their national exam results.

For the rest of the seventeen we are not confident enough to publish a column. The arrangement changes, and several schools describe it only in admissions material that is refreshed each year. A guess here would be worse than a blank, because this is exactly the sort of detail a family acts on. What we can give you instead is the check we would run ourselves. Look at the Secondary 1 posting information: a school running two tracks appears there with two separate intakes and two separate cut-off points, one labelled IP and one not. One intake means one programme. That check works in whichever year you are reading this, which is more than any table in a blog post can promise.

What the through-train removes, and what it leaves in place

The Integrated Programme takes away exactly one thing: the national examination at the end of Secondary 4. From 2027 that examination is the Singapore-Cambridge Secondary Education Certificate (SEC), which replaces the O-Level and N-Level certificates and reports subjects at G1, G2 and G3 levels. IP students will skip the SEC the way earlier cohorts skipped the O-Level.

Everything else stays. There is still a demanding external examination at the end of Year 6 — A-Level, IB Diploma, or the NUS High diploma assessment — and, in the six years before it, school examinations twice a year, set and marked by your child's own school. Subject choices at Year 4 still constrain what a student can read at university. Mother Tongue requirements and CCA commitments continue unchanged.

What families most often misread is the assessment load in Years 1 to 4. Removing a national exam does not remove assessment. It removes the common assessment. A G3 parent can pull up an SEAB syllabus document and know what will be examined; an IP parent cannot, because there is no national IP syllabus to pull up. Each school writes its own scheme of work, and what your child is tested on in March is a decision their own department made, one that need not match the decision made by the school down the road. That is the most practical difference between the two systems, and it is why generic "IP past papers" are worth so little: a paper of that kind is one school's assessment from one year, and your child is not sitting it.

Where IP Mathematics parts from G3, year by year

Mathematics is where the divergence is sharpest, and it does not arrive all at once.

Secondary 1 and 2. The topic lists overlap heavily with the mainstream lower-secondary syllabus: number, algebra, geometry, statistics, in roughly the familiar order. What differs is compression and question style. IP schools cover the same ground in less time and spend what they save on non-routine problems, multi-step reasoning and questions that look nothing like the worked example. A student can be coping here on strong arithmetic and recall alone, which is what makes these the years in which hidden gaps form quietly. Our Sec 1 IP and Sec 2 IP pages set out what we teach at each of these levels.

Secondary 3. The fork opens. G3 students split at this point into those taking Additional Mathematics on top of Elementary Mathematics and those taking Elementary alone, a split that exists to serve two separate national papers. Most IP schools do not run it, because they are not sitting those papers. So an IP Secondary 3 class is typically working from content that would sit in A-Math as its baseline, with material the national syllabus does not contain layered on top. Two students in the same term, one IP and one G3, can be studying a topic with the same name and be assessed on visibly different things.

Secondary 4. For a G3 student, Secondary 4 is the ceiling: everything narrows toward one paper in October. For an IP student it is the halfway mark, and schools use it as the run-up to Year 5. Calculus, function behaviour and proof-style argument tend to arrive earlier than they would in the mainstream track, because the destination is H2 Mathematics or an IB course rather than a national certificate. See our Sec 3 IP and Sec 4 IP pages for how we handle those two years.

Two things follow for families. Mainstream O-Level or SEC revision material is a poor fit for an IP student from Secondary 3 onward: it is aimed at a paper they will not sit, and it stops short of where their own school's assessments begin. And the comfortable feeling of Secondary 1 and 2 predicts very little. A student who kept up on speed and memory rather than on understanding tends to meet that bill in Secondary 3, when the questions stop rewarding pattern-matching.

"IP or IB?" compares a route to a certificate

IP is a route: six continuous years at one institution with no national exam in the middle. IB is a qualification: a two-year pre-university diploma awarded by the International Baccalaureate Organization. They are not alternatives to each other, which is why the question never resolves while it is put that way. Three of the seventeen IP schools lead to the IB, so those students have both. Plenty of students take the IB in Singapore without ever being in an IP, through international schools and privately-run programmes. And thirteen IP schools lead to the A-Level, so most IP students never touch the IB at all.

Underneath "IP or IB" there is usually one of two real questions. Either should we choose the six-year route or the four-year one, which is the subject of the Integrated Programme explainer and turns on whether your child benefits from a mid-secondary checkpoint. Or A-Level or IB at the end, which is a genuine comparison, and looks like this:

The Mathematics row is the one that changes planning. Under the A-Level a student can, in principle, carry no Mathematics at all into their final two years. Under the IB every Diploma candidate takes a Mathematics course from Group 5: currently Mathematics: Analysis and Approaches or Mathematics: Applications and Interpretation, each offered at Higher and Standard Level. Analysis and Approaches is the more algebraic and proof-oriented of the two, and the usual choice for students heading toward mathematics, engineering or economics; Applications and Interpretation leans toward modelling, statistics and technology use. Both carry the 20% exploration, which has no counterpart on the A-Level side, where the Mathematics grade comes entirely from written examinations. That is a real adjustment for a student who has only ever been asked to answer questions rather than choose one. Our IB Mathematics page covers what we teach across these courses.

One caution on the IB specifics above: the current course guides date from first teaching in 2019, and the IB reviews subject guides on a rolling cycle, so course names and assessment weightings can change between one cohort and the next. Confirm the details for your child's entry year with their school rather than assuming these carry forward.

What this list cannot tell you

The table above is accurate on structure and silent on nearly everything a family agonises over.

It will not tell you how hard the Mathematics actually is at a given school. Two schools with identical rows — both A-Level, both keeping their students for six years — can pitch Secondary 3 Mathematics very differently, and no table will show you that gap. The only document that settles it is the school's own. Ask the department for the scheme of work for the year, and for a past internal paper rather than a syllabus outline: an outline gives you topic names, and the standard is the entire question.

Nor will it tell you whether a school suits your particular child. Six years is a long time in one cohort, and the case against the route deserves a proper hearing before the case for it. The Integrated Programme explainer sets out the tradeoffs honestly, including the ones IP marketing tends to skip.

Cut-off points are the other thing to take from the source rather than from here. They move every cycle, and any number you find in an article, ours included, is a snapshot of an admissions round that has already closed. Take them from the school's own admissions page and from MOE's published information for the year your child is applying.

The one thing to remember: the seventeen IP schools are not seventeen versions of the same programme. They end at three different qualifications, nine of them keep your child for six years while eight hand them to a partner school after four, and every one of them writes its own Mathematics scheme of work. Which school, not simply whether it is IP, is the decision you are actually making.

A note on accuracy: the school list, campus arrangements and final qualifications above were checked against MOE school records and each school's own published programme pages. Cut-off points, admissions arrangements and the composition of the list itself change between cycles, and syllabus details on both the A-Level and IB sides are revised periodically. Nothing here should be treated as current for a future application year without confirming it with the school and with MOE. Where we were not confident enough to publish a fact — specifically, which schools run a parallel four-year track — we have said so and given the check rather than guessed.

A note on our own position: we teach Mathematics, including to students in several of the schools listed above, so we have an obvious interest in you concluding that IP Mathematics needs support. Most IP students do not need tuition, and a student keeping up comfortably in Secondary 1 is usually better left alone. The point at which support tends to earn its keep is Secondary 3, when the content stops overlapping with anything a parent can look up.

If your child is already in one of these seventeen and the Mathematics has pulled away from what you can check at home, talk to our team and tell us which school. We teach against that school's own scheme of work rather than a national syllabus your child will never sit. Our Integrated Programme Mathematics page sets out how we do it, and secondary Mathematics covers the levels on either side.