Singapore provides an entitlement of 100 hours of professional development per year to teachers to keep up with the rapid changes occurring in the world and to be able to improve their practice. And Singapore, like other countries, is improving its performance-appraisal system, making sure that each teacher is appraised by a whole group of people every year against 16 different competencies.0 Teachers who do outstanding work receive a bonus from the school's bonus pool. The high quality of teachers in those countries appears to be a function of the policies that determine the pool from which teachers are initially drawn, their compensation, the status of teachers, the high standards of entering university-level teacher-preparation programmes, the quality of their initial preparation, and the attention given to the quality of their preparation following their initial induction. But the fact is that many of the countries with the strongest student performance also have the strongest teachers' unions, beginning with Japan and Finland.