SINGAPORE: Senior Minister Teo Chee Hean announced last month that he is stepping down after 53 years in public service, including 33 years in politics.

In a wide-ranging interview with the media on Tuesday (May 20) ahead of his retirement, Mr Teo said finely tuned coordination across ministries remains key as the country deals with cross-cutting issues like climate change and national security.

The 70-year-old – who is also Coordinating Minister for National Security – reflected on his political career as well, including his time as Education Minister from 1997 to 2003.

Before he entered politics in 1992, he served in various roles in the Singapore Armed Forces and was appointed Chief of Navy in 1991.

Q. In your 33 years in politics, what was the toughest decision you had to make?

A. Decisions are never easy because they all have to balance many different factors. They impact the individual lives of people and their interests. So you have to understand that and take that into account. And for politics in Singapore, you are a member of parliament first before you are a minister, and so you cannot make policy and then go and hide in your ivory tower.

Some of the issues which we are able to tackle in Singapore, which many countries face difficulty in doing, are really the long-term issues … if you don't take action now or next year or  in two years’ time, you lose one year or two years or three years or four years or five years, and then by the time the issue you have to confront the issue already, you have lost four or five years, because it takes that amount of time for this kind of policy to actually come to fruition and for the gestation period. So education is really one of them, and I spent about six, seven years in education. And it was a very satisfying period.

The two things I'm happiest with from the Ministry of Education are, we completely revamped the teachers' career schemes. Salaries was one thing, but also the careers, to have the teaching track, the leadership track and the specialist track, so that we were able to develop teachers much more fully and holistically. And also in the course of that, I think we managed to raise the status of teachers in society, and I think that was very important for the teachers and our whole school system.

The other one I'm really very happy with is ITE (Institute of Technical Education). I mean, ITE was the idea of Dr Tay Eng Soon to change from VITB (Vocat...