About
We don’t just teach. We build the foundations students carry for life.
Arche Academy International — IB and IGCSE, and nothing else.
Where we started
We started with Singapore’s own syllabus.
Arche Academy opened in 2022 in Hougang, by Kovan MRT, teaching the Singapore national curriculum: PSLE, O-Level and A-Level mathematics and sciences, five students to a class. More than 700 students have been through that centre since.
The method was built there. Find the first principle a student is missing, rebuild from it, then teach the exact structure of answer the mark scheme pays for. Singapore’s national exams are unforgiving about method and precision, and that is the standard our lessons are built to.
Our first international-school student joined in the same year. Since then Glen has taught more than 80 IB and IGCSE students, most of them one to one at first and now at the centre too. Their grades are on the results page, in full.
Those families asked different questions: Internal Assessments, command terms, HL or SL, Cambridge or Edexcel. They deserved a school of their own rather than a corner of a PSLE centre. Arche Academy International is that school. Same founder, same five-student cap, same centre, teaching IB and IGCSE only.
The name
What “Arche” means.
Arche — ἀρχή — is the Greek word for the beginning, the first principle, the thing everything else is built on.
We chose it because it describes the method. A student who cannot factorise will not survive HL calculus, however many past papers they sit. We find the first principle that is missing and rebuild from there. It is slower in week one and considerably faster by month three.
Why a separate school
Why IB and IGCSE get a school of their own.
Teaching IB and IGCSE students year after year, the same struggles kept surfacing. These curricula are broad by design, testing a wide range of concepts across subjects, and the study materials that exist to support students are thin. Even where resources exist, students are rarely shown how to structure an answer or which words earn the marks.
The leap from Grade 10 to IB Year 1 is the steepest of all. Suddenly a student is managing the Extended Essay, Internal Assessments and a full co-curricular schedule on top of a syllabus that has just doubled in demand. Students who thrived a year earlier find themselves underwater.
Running them as a separate school, rather than a timetable inside a PSLE centre, means the subject guides get read, the rubrics get marked against, and the syllabus changes get noticed.
The method
Five to a class, and worksheets built for one child.
We cap every class at five students. That is the number at which a tutor can still check every student’s working during the lesson rather than after it.
Within the group, each student gets worksheets built for their own foundation level. The class moves through the syllabus together; the practice each student does is not the same. That is what we mean by personalised, and it is the only definition of the word we will use on this site.
You get a written progress update at regular intervals — what was covered, what improved, and what is still weak. Not a grade with no explanation attached.
Questions