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 over to a different school at the end of Year 4 — which decides where your child sits their final exam, whose cohort they graduate with, and which campus they commute to at seventeen. That detail is almost never in the list.

Three of the seventeen also end somewhere other than the A-Level. One ends at a qualification no other school in the country awards.

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. If you want the prior question — whether the six-year route suits your child at all — we cover the tradeoffs in the Integrated Programme, explained. 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 become 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.

Reading the table: three splits that matter more than reputation

School rankings dominate how families compare this list. The three structural splits below are more decision-relevant, and unlike reputation they are checkable facts.

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 changes 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 moving campus at the end of Year 4 goes through something closer to a normal school change, minus the exam — new teachers, new assessment culture, a merged cohort. A student staying put does not.

There is a simple way to check this for any school without taking our word for it: look at the levels the school itself says it teaches. The nine that keep their students run right through to Junior College 2; the eight that hand over stop at Secondary 4. Every school in the table above lines up with that rule.

Three certificates, not one

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.

That difference is not cosmetic. It sets what your child studies from Year 5, how they are assessed, and — for Mathematics specifically — whether they can drop the subject at all. More on that below.

Whole-cohort IP versus a parallel four-year track

Some of these schools put their entire Secondary 1 intake into IP. Raffles Institution, Hwa Chong Institution and Dunman High School work this way: enrolling means joining the six-year programme. 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.

We are not confident enough about the remaining schools to publish a full column, because the arrangement changes and several schools describe it only in admissions material that is refreshed each year. The reliable check is the Secondary 1 posting information: a school running two tracks appears with two separate intakes and two separate cut-off points, one labelled IP and one not. One intake means one programme.

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. Your child still sits a demanding external examination at the end of Year 6 — A-Level, IB Diploma, or the NUS High diploma assessment. They still sit school examinations twice a year for six years, set and marked by their own school. They still need to make subject choices at Year 4 that constrain what they can read at university. Mother Tongue requirements and CCA commitments continue unchanged.

The thing 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 student and their parents can look up an SEAB syllabus document and know what will be examined. An IP parent cannot, because there is no national IP syllabus to look 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. This is the single most practical difference between the two systems, and it is the reason generic "IP past papers" are worth very little.

Where IP Mathematics parts from G3, year by year

Mathematics is where the divergence is sharpest, and it does not happen 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 do not resemble the worked example. A student can be "coping" here on strong arithmetic and recall alone, which is what makes this the stage where hidden gaps form. 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 doing content that would sit in A-Math as its baseline, with material the national syllabus does not contain layered on top. A Secondary 3 IP student and a Secondary 3 G3 student can be studying the same named topic 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 these two years.

Two consequences follow for families. First, mainstream O-Level or SEC revision material is a weak 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 start. Second, the comfortable feeling of Secondary 1 and 2 is not predictive. 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

This is the most common confusion in the whole topic, and untangling it changes the question you end up asking.

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. 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.

The question underneath "IP or IB" is usually one of two real ones. Either should we choose the six-year route or the four-year one — which is 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 matters most for 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 include the 20% exploration, which has no counterpart in the A-Level. Our IB Mathematics page covers what we teach across these courses.

One caution on IB Mathematics specifics: 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 specific entry year with their school rather than assuming these carry forward.

Getting in, briefly

Two doors, and both are ordinary. IP places are posted through the same PSLE-score-based Secondary 1 Posting exercise as every other secondary place, with each school's IP intake carrying its own cut-off — among the most competitive nationally, which is why the AL scoring and posting mechanics are worth understanding properly before ranking choices. The second door is Direct School Admission, where IP schools are permitted a larger share of their intake than non-IP schools take: broadly a third against a fifth, though the exact figure sits with each school and moves year to year. Our DSA-Sec guide covers that route end to end.

NUS High sits outside both descriptions. It does not take part in Secondary 1 Posting at all and admits its entire intake through DSA, so it has no PSLE cut-off to compare against the others. Selection runs on its own tests and on demonstrated work in Mathematics and Science.

What this list cannot tell you

The table above is accurate on structure and silent on everything a family agonises over. Four things it will not answer:

How hard the Mathematics is at a given school. Two schools with identical entries in that table — both A-Level, both keeping their students for six years — can pitch Secondary 3 Mathematics very differently. Ask the school for a scheme of work and a past internal paper, not a syllabus outline.

Whether the school suits your particular child. Six years is a long time in one cohort. The Integrated Programme explainer sets out the tradeoffs honestly, including the ones IP marketing tends to skip.

Current cut-off points. They move every year, and any number you find in an article — including in ours — is a snapshot of a past cycle. Check the school's own admissions page and MOE's published information for the cycle your child is applying in.

Whether a parallel four-year track exists this year. As above, the Secondary 1 posting information is the check, not a blog post.

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.

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, DSA quotas 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 in one of these schools and you want Mathematics support built around that school's own scheme of work rather than a national syllabus they will not sit, talk to our team. You can also read more about how we approach Integrated Programme Mathematics and secondary Mathematics generally.