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Initially, vocational education in Singapore carried a negative stigma and was looked down upon as a dead-end option for underachieving students. In the 1960s, it was considered less than socially desirable educational option as vocational education was perceived that these schools were for low achieving students. Societal prejudice against less academically inclined students and vocational education was regarded low quality and typically out of step with the changing needs of employers. The perception of technical and vocational education in Singapore are slowly changing as parents are starting to realise that there are alternative choices for decent employment outcomes as the greater Singaporean society values vocational and technical skills highly and sees them as crucial to the country's economic development. Vocational education has been an important part of Singapore's unique economic planning since 1992, where it began to transform and change the perception of vocational education and decided to transform and preposition it so that it was not seen as a place of last resort for underachieving pupils. Vocational schools such as the Institute of Technical Education were intended to revolutionise vocational education and portray the institution as a world-class example of the importance of vocational skills being translated to a 21st-century knowledge-based economy.