华文名：圣安东尼小学

History

St. Anthony’s Primary School was originally called St Anna’s School. Funded by the Catholic Portuguese Mission of Singapore, the school started in a small rented house on Middle Road on 1 August 1879. Father Jose Pedro Sta Anna de Cunha started the school to provide free tuition to poor boys and girls who could not afford an education even though the school fees then were very low.

On 23 February 1886, the school moved to a new school building and was renamed St. Anthony’s Boys’ and Girls’ School. In November 1893, the school split into two schools: St. Anthony’s Boys’ School and St. Anthony’s Girls’ School. The boys’ school occupied two old shophouses behind the Parochial House on Middle Road. In 1924, the Portuguese Mission and the colonial government agreed to share the cost of building a new school. In June 1926, a reinforced concrete three-storey building was completed with a bronze statue of St. Anthony at the top. This building is still standing today and has been gazetted for conservation.

On 11 October 1938, an agreement was signed between the Vicar General of the Portuguese Mission and the Visitor of the Christian Brothers in Malaya for the school to be managed by the Christian Brothers of St John Baptist de La Salle. In January 1939, the full school became one of the six LaSalle schools in Singapore.

During the Japanese Occupation, the school continued to function as part of the Japanese educational system and resumed as an English-medium school after the war.

In 1954, it was felt that the school could not provide adequate laboratory and other special facilities. Some of the St. Anthony’s Boys’ School secondary classes were then transferred to St. Joseph’s Institution. In 1961, all the secondary classes were transferred to St. Joseph’s Institution, and St. Anthony’s Boys’ School became solely a primary school.

The school was relocated to Bukit Batok in May 1992 and became a co-educational school. It was renamed St. Anthony’s Primary School.

In 2013, the school was temporarily relocated to enable the Bukit Batok campus to undergo extensive redevelopment works under PRIME upgrading. New facilities included an indoor sports hall and two additional levels of classrooms at the existing blocks. This enabled the school to operate as a single-session school from 2015. The school celebrated its 135th anniversary on 4 July 2015.