Singapore Primary School Registration Starts – Distance Guide

P1 Registration Exercise Starts - Image Credit: Ministry of Education
P1 Registration Exercise Starts - Image Credit: Ministry of Education
It’s almost the time of the year with parents flocking for their children’s primary school registrations. It’s a huge culture in Singapore and families tend to do move homes closer to their choice schools for enrolment.

The registration exercise for admission to primary one in 2010 will open from Tuesday, 7 July 2009 to Friday, 28 August 2009.

What’s the distance guide for Primary school enrolment and the priorities? How do you gauge the official distance of your home, your new home to your choice of school?

Ministry of Education Guideline

Parents can read the proximity guide which can be found on MOE’s website. Some abstracts coming from the official source,

Yes, you can register your child at any school of your choice. However if there are more applications than vacancies, then balloting will be conducted. Balloting will be conducted according to the following order of priority:

  1. Children living within 1 km of the school of choice;
  2. Children living between 1 km and 2 km of the school of choice;
  3. Children living outside 2 km of the school of choice.

You can find out more on how schools does their registration if they are undergoing PRIME (Programme for Rebuilding and IMproving Existing Schools) should they be relocated to another temporary site whilst the actual is undergoing renovation.

So what is the official source to determine a distance between my home and my choice school?

MOE provides schools with an updated list of Home-School distance categories each year, about 2 weeks before the start of the Primary 1 registration process. Parents are welcome to call up the schools to check their official distance from the school at no cost.

Singapore Land Authority’s (SLA) site INLIS will be the only official source that the school will use to determine whether you are in category Zone 1, Zone 2 or Zone 3. Unfortunately it isn’t a paid service, so you’ll have to fork out $2.10. The computation will be based by your postal code and your choice of school.

Example of how an official note from SLA will look like when you purchase one

ps. If you are serious about buying a house because of school registration, please make sure your apartment really falls under the Zone 1 category properly; Having a condominium apartment that is near your desired school doesn’t automatically means that it is within the 1km radius, different blocks of the project might give you a different reading between Zone 1, 2 or Zone 3 even.

I don’t feel like paying $2.10, what else can I use?

KiasuParents has an excellent guide on measuring home-school distance with other alternatives like using MyLifeStyleMap and StreetDB. There’s also alot of primary school resources for you to refer to in KiasuParents which are amazingly useful:-