Committee of Supply – Head K (Ministry of Education)

Future of Education, Educators and Learners

Mr Patrick Tay Teck Guan (Pioneer): Mr Chairman, I beg to move, "That the total sum to be allocated for Head K of the Estimates be reduced by $100."

Sir, with the half-life of skills shortening in an increasingly disruptive, transformative, highly unpredictable and uncertain world and future upon us, I see an urgent imperative for Singapore to build and forge an even more future-ready and future-proof education system – one that encourages a learning continuum where our education system and a Continuing Education and Training (CET) ecosystem where our teachers and adult educators, our students and our adult learners are seamlessly aligned and well-connected to be best prepared for the future of skills, jobs, education and training.

Implementing lifelong learning will require more than expanding opportunities for adult learning. Lifelong learning will push systems to fundamentally rethink the timing and sequencing of education and skills development over an individual's life course. This includes the early stages of learning from childhood and into early adulthood and beyond.

Learning trajectories will become more complex for people of all ages, requiring more sophisticated support arrangements. Establishing how individuals learn best at different stages in their lives and how to distribute learning opportunities and resources over the life cycle will become key policy paradigms.

We have done much over the past years in building and fortifying our education system to help ensure that each and every student has an opportunity to the provision of multiple pathways offered by our education system. Moving ahead, the challenge falls on how to marry, match the passions and interests and aspirations of every Singaporean and to help every Singaporean to realise fully their true potential.

To ensure our education system continues to be future-ready and future-proof, I opine that that should be greatest synergy, collaboration, linkages and integration between the mainstream education, pre-employment training all through to adult and worker continuing education training and learning.

In short, the entire continuum and ecosystem needs to rethink what we teach, when we teach, where we teach and how we teach.

We need to better align the future of education and learning to the future of work and workplaces. This is crucial if you want to truly embrace the love of learning and lifelong learning.

The old adage of "learn, work and retire" will become passé. The next normal will be "learn, work, learn, work, learn, work and then, perhaps, retire".

If I may draw on some learnings of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report on the future of education.

Tomorrow's educational institutions will need to help learners to think for themselves and join others in work. Educators will need to learn to learn learners develop a strong sense of right and wrong and a sensitivity to the claims that others make. Individuals will need to learn to live with themselves, with others and with the planet. At work, at home and in the community, people will need a deep understanding of how others think, whether as scientists or artists, and how others live in different cultures and traditions.

12.45 pm

Technology is also creating new, alternative channels for human learning outside of institutional frameworks. Isolated time and space for learning was necessary when teachers and resources were scarce. But the ubiquity of opportunities will allow learning to move beyond its institutional confinements.

Enhanced by technology, learning will gradually flow to informal contexts and move beyond age defined limitations. We will shift from qualification oriented attainment upfront to a new distribution of learning and skill development. Technology can support both learning throughout life as well as ways to recognise such learning. Moving learning out of its institutional and age-related barriers will create important public policy challenges, requiring the development of new partnerships, support learning with innovative arrangements on both the supply and demand side.

Teachers in our schools and educators in our Institutes of Higher Learning, including in the PEIs and CET centres, have undergone much change and have had to grapple with the many exacting requirements. I am particularly concerned with the mental well-being of our teachers, as well as adult educators, in light of such curveballs constantly hurled at them and having had to cope with the demands and expectations of students, learners, the administration as well as parents, and so on.

I therefore urge MOE to embark on an in-depth study and survey of our teachers and educators, together with our tripartite partners to better assess the current state of stress, mental health, and wellness of our education fraternity so that better interventions and support can be provided for them in their teaching journey.

In a similar vein, the future of teaching is fraught with new challenges. The age old one-size-fits-all teaching method has long been outgrown, with the focus moving on to catering teaching methods to different styles of learners. Educators also need to not just use technology but make use of the right technology. Classroom management and curriculum will also need to keep pace with changes across industries, including a need to foster a global mindset in today's students.

To keep pace and stay abreast of what is happening across industries and sectors, I suggest that MOE allow our teachers and adult educators an opportunity to take sabbaticals and industry attachments, including secondments outside of MOE and the private sector for an extended period of time so that they can translate their learnings, experiences in their teachings, when they return to the education space.

For our students, classrooms would continue to move towards being paperless and more computer based. Coaching and mentoring will become more important. Though the students will incorporate much independence into their learning process, mentoring will become fundamental to our student and learner success. As such, more resources should be dedicated by MOE to this function, which actually integrates leading with early career guidance, which I submit, we can do more of and better in across the board.

On the adult learner front, NTUC recently embarked on a study with 564 business leaders across industries, looking into how CET can be enhanced to upskill our workers to meet the needs of today's and tomorrow's labour market. The five key findings revealed: (a) skills mismatch continues to be the most prevalent form of mismatch; (b) the top five transferable skills sought after by business leaders are adaptability, customer orientation, communication, problem solving and collaboration; (c) only 50.9% of business leaders have sent their workers for training in the past six months. Out of those business leaders who sent workers for training, only 33.6% of their workforce actually attended training; (d) workers with skills gaps are not the top priority for training as compared to workers with higher potential; and (e) majority of the business leaders are reported to have observe positive changes in their workers post training.

In conclusion, it is therefore submitted that to succeed in CET for adult learners and workers, it has to be in collaboration with our tripartite partners and a multi-stakeholder approach. We need to promote more equal distribution of training opportunities for workers. With the $100 million announced at Budget 2022 to support the Labour Movement in our company training committee formation and CET, MOE and SkillsFuture can now leverage on NTUC's training and placement ecosystem as a strategic partner to drive the CET agenda for workers and adult learners.

Question proposed.

Future of Education

Ms Denise Phua Lay Peng (Jalan Besar): Singapore’s education system, as we know it, will lose its currency and relevance if we do not make some important moves.

There are enough evidence and inputs to inform us on what the future of education will look like. The frontloading of education – cramping most of learning before one’s first job – has to change. Traditional content such as basic literacy, English, Mathematics, will need to be updated; adding to them, digital literacy, data literacy, financial literacy and a slew of competencies, attributes and values needed to survive in this age of unprecedented change.

Person-centred, competency-based, mastery-based, self-driven, bite-sized, just-in-time, chasing skills, not paper; classrooms without walls, schools without walls – these are all quoted as the future of education. The entire education ecosystem has enlarged. Members of this House have just seen the National Library Board’s latest blueprint that talks about learning marketplaces, learning superstores that serve all Singaporeans. And NLB is not even part of MOE.

Sir, the future of education is now. Think big, believe big and act now. Let me propose five ways to begin this exciting journey.

First, update and cascade the vision of education so that more Singaporeans are aligned in our end in mind, from K to 12, from young to old. I fully resonate with Education Minister Chan Chun Sing’s views of what education should be – of continual learning, connecting, collaborations and confidence building. Minister spoke about having to stop thinking of educating cohorts and the traditional KPI of "Cohort Participation Rates" and replace it with the concept of "Lifelong Learning Participation Rate". Makes a lot of sense, if we think of how every Singaporean ought to prepare for each of the average four to five job changes he makes in his working life.

Second, address the restraining forces of change, the often unspoken elephants in the room. The glaring and valid concern of educators in the face of an ever increasingly overloaded curricula; an expectation of the educators to pivot to become content curators, learning designers and life coaches; and then to teach in a way that they themselves had not quite experienced before.

What about the less glaring but stronger restraining force that is unseen, below the waterline? The beliefs, the conditioned behaviours and fears of the very people involved in education: our school leaders, educators, parents and employers?

Someone once quipped that education is an inherently conservative social enterprise and changing education systems is sometimes like trying to move a graveyard. It will be hard for Singapore. We are a victim of our success. We are so used, for example, to use the academic yardstick in parenting, in hiring and even in judging each other.

Three, show it can be done. Be bold. Pick a few strategic pilots and go for broke. For instance, pilot through-train schools without the PSLE – an idea I brought up for years. If PSLE, regardless of what the MOE has tried, is still a sacred cow and if slain, can free time and space for change, then let go of it! The risk is not high. Singapore will not be the first in the world to operate through-trained Primary to Secondary schools.

Four, start with the educator of educators. Singapore is blessed to have a teaching workforce that is well regarded, professional and motivated. Their mothership, the National Institute of Education, will need to be prepared to raise our educators to find their place in the new enlarged education ecosystem. NIE will have to rethink its traditional modes of management, collaborate and connect with local and global partners, to reframe and to refresh its institution and offerings.

Lastly, let us start addressing the challenges of adult learners. Andreas Schleicher, OECD’s Special Adviser, has observed the striking skills gap between Singapore’s younger and older workforce, and he advised the strong need for Singapore to seriously develop our older workers. There are of course challenges – not availability of courses only but likely the motivation to learn or the way by which adult learning is designed and offered. But focus, we must, seriously on our adult and older learners. If we do not, many of them will become Singapore’s future low-wage earners.

Sir, the future of education is now. Think big, believe big and let us act now.

Review of Summative Assessments

Mr Darryl David (Ang Mo Kio): Mr Chairman, Marva Delores Collins, an American educator who is famed for her teaching method and for her work in educating impoverished students once said that “when someone is taught the joy of learning, it becomes a lifelong process that never stops, a process that creates a logical individual. That is the challenge and joy of teaching.”

Although this adage was made years ago prior to the advent of the Internet and before the age of technology assisted learning, it is now truer than ever. In today’s day and age where new knowledge is constantly being created and new skills render old ones irrelevant, it is important for educators to inculcate the joy of learning in students so that they are truly educated and have learned how to learn, not just schooled. While we know the importance of inculcating the joy of learning in students, it is a challenge to do so in an assessment-driven and exams- focused education system where rote learning and regurgitation might reap great rewards.

Some time ago, MOE took the step of removing exams for Primary 1 and Primary 2 to allow for a learning experience and learning environment that would allow children to grow and develop without having to deal with the pressures and burdens of major exams.

I believe this was a step in the right direction, I commend MOE for this, as it encouraged students to uncover the joys of learning without having to worry about how well they do in summative assessments like exams. Without a doubt, summative assessments are still important because they allow us to assess how much the students have absorbed the material and knowledge, and tests and exams are useful indicators of one’s progress in knowledge acquisition.

But, as I have said before in this House, formative assessments can also provide an indication of a student’s development and academic growth. Grades can also be apportioned to coursework and there are many subjects that are based on 100% coursework.

Would the Government review the need to have less summative assessments across all levels of Primary school even up to Secondary school levels, and move towards having more formative assessments that cater to more holistic and complete development of our students?

Curriculum Content

Mr Lim Biow Chuan (Mountbatten): Sir, last year, MOE cancelled the year-end examinations for Primary 3 and Primary 4 students to mitigate the disruptions to schooling caused by COVID-19. Many parents and students alike heaved a sigh of relief as they were uncertain of the requirements due to the disruptive nature of the pandemic.

Exams do add a huge amount of stress to students. Frequently, students spend hours trying to memorise the content of the textbooks which they had studied during the year in order to regurgitate the answers to which their teachers want to read in the student’s exam script.

But in today’s world, knowledge content, while it is still important, is no longer the sole criterion of a person’s ability. The Dean designate of the new NUS College, Prof Simon Chesterman, wrote an Opinion article for The Straits Times in January this year. In his article, he shared that in the past, “teachers and professors were in possession of knowledge, and they were paid by students, or their parents, or the state, to pass on that knowledge to the students. However, today, every student holds a device that can access almost all of human knowledge. Thus, our phones are a portal to vastly more knowledge than will ever fit into any of our brains.”

In view of the availability of technology, I urge MOE to review the current curriculum of the students. MOE had previously said that they had reduced 20% of the school curriculum under the “Teach Less Learn More” initiative. However, the previous reduction in curriculum had not resulted in less stress or less workload for the students. Hence, I urge the schools and tertiary institutions to consider reducing the content of the subjects taught to the students.

Instead, more focus can be placed on how the student can do research or acquire information; how to discern truth from false information. It is the training of the mind to learn how to acquire knowledge that is more important. Can MOE also emphasise on the overall development of a student’s character so that the student can be prepared for life ahead in the real world?

1.00 pm

May I ask the Minister how can MOE help our students to develop future-ready competencies through a more varied and engaging pedagogy in the classroom as well as self-initiated learning? Education should be a journey where a student enjoys and takes delight in learning and the discovery of new things which are important to him in life. It should not be a stressful period because of the need to memorise school work and to pass year-end examinations.

Teaching Emotional Intelligence

Dr Tan Yia Swam (Nominated Member): Mr Chairman, in Mandarin, please.

(In Mandarin): [Please refer to Vernacular Speech.] Mr Chairman, I have two kids who are in Primary school. Parents all want the best for our children, and we may have different ideas of what is "best", and have different levels of means to provide. Some people send their children for enrichment classes, some assign their kids chores at home. Whatever method is used, there’s generally more awareness now to teach life skills and resilience.

There have been many positive changes in our formal education since when I was in primary school. There is more structured learning, and improved communications with parents. There are great resources on the MOE website on social and emotional learning.

But theory is just the beginning, the challenge is in the real life implementation. How may we truly teach emotional wellness and resilience: that it is okay to not be liked all the time, that it is okay not to be perfect. How does one teach children to think for themselves, shrug off failure, handle disappointment, and to have the strength and courage to keep on going.

I want to register my thanks and appreciation for school teachers and educators of all levels, who have been working doubly hard in these COVID times, to provide face-to-face lessons, and to also standby for home-based learning, in addition to doing safe distancing measurements. I am thankful to them for keeping such a close eye on our children.

Parental involvement is essential to a child’s educational journey, but I have to constantly remind myself not to solve every problem for them. In previous speeches, Mr Tharman spoke on how Singapore parents must evolve, and avoid the trend of helicopter parenting.

I have met older teenagers holding part-time jobs and doing their part to pay for their schooling. I have also met people in their 40s, who still need to ask their parents for all decisions, because that is how it has been their whole lives – to check with their parents.

Personally, I see that my role as a mother is to provide for them and to teach them to be the best they can be. I cannot be around for them forever. So, I need to teach them to be independent. I know it is hard, but we have to let our children make their own decisions and accept the consequences of their actions. This may start from the playground, to allow them to climb and fall- while we stand ready to catch them, rather than forbid them to climb at all.

Fellow parents, let us stop pursuing the perfect checklist, and truly enable our children to be ready to face the challenges of the real world.

Staggered School Start Times

Assoc Prof Jamus Jerome Lim (Sengkang): Sir, this House has previously debated the possibility of later school start times. Those in favour have cited evidence, which was compelling in my view, that phase delays in adolescent Circadian rhythms predisposed them towards sleeping and waking later, typically by about two hours, although some, like my sister, appear to have never grown up and exited this phase.

The counter arguments are often two-fold. First, that any delay would simply mean that students go to bed even later and, second, that such delays could give rise to disruptive rush-hour crunches. The first assertion, as it turns out, is one that is weakly supported by evidence. Students who have later start times sleep longer, with bedtimes that either remain unchanged or delayed by a smaller amount than the additional time afforded. Many credible studies have shown that affording adolescents additional sleep can have yielded payoffs in terms of improved behaviour, health and academic outcomes. This is even so, with a relatively modest delay of just half an hour or so. More importantly, the reality is that students are already experiencing sleep deprivations from the status quo. One study placed this proportion at a staggering 80% of Singaporean teenagers hailing from high-ranked schools.

Think of all the marginal steps that parents take – the additional hours of supplemental tuition, the move to a neighbourhood closer to a preferred school, the endless bottles of essence of chicken. And it strikes me as failing to pick the lowest hanging fruit when we look at more expensive and intrusive educational interventions but neglect this relatively simple one.

As for the second assertion, I am sure that we will all agree that we should not be compromising as important an outcome as student performance simply in favour of one of logistical convenience. My proposal today is simple. Delay upper Primary school start time by half an hour and Secondary school start time by an hour. For schools currently starting at 7.30 am, the earliest start time at the moment, this would mean a meantime of 8.00 am for the Primary cohort and 8.30 am for the Secondary cohort. While I am not suggesting any strict guidelines for post-Secondary levels, it is reasonable that ITEs, Polytechnics and Junior Colleges start even later, at 9.00 am.

The additional half hour for upper-Primary students is consistent with how sleep phase delay may occur as early as the onset of puberty and also, certainly, by the time that they are teenagers. And since Primary cohorts are also comparatively larger than Secondary cohorts, it also makes sense to balance out the inflow of students headed to schools in the morning.

While delays for upper Primary and Secondary school students will, undeniably, alter traffic patterns, its contribution to the overall morning rush-hour jam is likely to be somewhat limited. The half-hour delay for half the Primary cohort would likely add a limited number of additional vehicles to the road, seeing that many upper Primary school students would already begin travelling to school by public or private buses by then. Moreover, these buses would, in any case, begin their pick-up rounds between 7.00 am and 8.00 am, well before typical work start times. And as more Secondary school students already know how to travel to school independently by public transportation, their even later start time will also likely have a limited impact on traffic patterns. Indeed, with more parents working from home or exercising flexible work schedules in a post-pandemic world, it could easily be the case that any anticipated increase in rush-hour traffic be offset by the reduction in working commuters.

The staggered school start times could also carry a tangential logistical benefit. Schools currently often face jams during arrival and dismissal times, with roads surrounding schools ensnarled by traffic. This is an isolated but genuine problem as those of us who have received complaints from residents living near schools would well understand. Staggering school start times could reduce the incoming traffic by as much as a third, which would help alleviate this morning school rush-hour crunch.

Through-train and Self-initiated Learning

Ms Hazel Poa (Non-Constituency Member): Mr Chairman, first of all, I declare that I run an education company operating education centres and a private school.

Today, I wish to again urge MOE to consider implementing a pilot project of a 10-year through-train programme for Primary and Secondary school students, bypassing the PSLE. Members of Parliament across time and political parties – Ms Paulin Straughan, Mr Hri Kumar, Mr Yee Jenn Jong, Ms Kuik Shiao-Yin, Mr Kok Heng Leun, Ms Denise Phua and myself – have spoken up either for the scrapping of PSLE or a through-train pilot programme giving parents and students the option of bypassing PSLE.

The PSLE remains the most stressful examination for local parents and students. Despite changes to the assessment, the PSLE stakes are high for parents, educators and students. Chronic stress from high-stakes examinations on young children is undesirable. Neuroscience tells us that long-term negative stress impedes the brain development of children. These are bad outcomes for their esteem and mental health. Lately, tragic incidents have given us a rude wake-up call to pay more attention to the mental well-being of our students.

Over the years, efforts have been made to reduce stress on students by removing examinations at certain levels. However, the PSLE is the elephant in the room. A previous Education Minister has said that “removing the PSLE and having a through-train will only transfer the stress on parents and students elsewhere, such as at the P1 registration”. But if the through-train programme is implemented in a limited number of schools while the mainstream is still on the PSLE system, this would not happen. This would, at least, give parents and students a choice. As we learn from the experience, we can decide later whether the through-train programme should be extended to more schools. In Mandarin please.

(In Mandarin): [Please refer to Vernacular Speech.] Today, I wish to again urge MOE to consider implementing a pilot project of a through-train programme.

Over the last 10 years. Members from different parties have urged the Government to scrap PSLE and allow parents and students to bypass PSLE. PSLE remains the most stressful examination for local parents and their children. Chronic stress from high-stakes examinations form a long-term negative stress that can impede the brain development of children and also affect children's esteem and mental health. Lately, tragic incidents have given us a wake-up call to pay more attention to the mental well-being of our students.

A previous Education Minister has said that "removing the PSLE and having a through-train will only transfer the stress on parents and students elsewhere, such as at P1 registration". But if the through-train programme is implemented in a limited number of schools, while the mainstream is still on the PSLE system, this will not happen. This will at least give parents and students a choice. As we learn from the experience, we can then decide whether we should extend it to more schools.

(In English): In 2020, MOE announced the introduction of student-initiated learning (SIL) in Secondary schools, Junior Colleges and MI. I would like to seek more information from MOE on this initiative. One, how many schools have implemented SIL? Two, if there are schools that have implemented SIL last year, how was it implemented and what was the outcome?

PLD was also rolled out last year. Can MOE confirm that no students are without access to PLD due to financial reasons? After one year of implementation, how has PLD affected the students’ learning?

PSLE Benchmark for Full-time Madrasah

Mr Muhamad Faisal Bin Abdul Manap (Aljunied): Sir, when the Compulsory Education Act was implemented in 2003, MOE implemented a minimum academic benchmark for madrasah students, requiring them to attain a PSLE aggregate higher than the average PSLE aggregate score of Malay students in the six-lowest performing national Primary schools. It was deemed necessary for madrasah students to meet this benchmark to ensure that they will be able to complete their Primary education and will possess the minimum academic standards required for them to qualify for Secondary school.

Regrettably, a madrasah was not able to meet MOE’s benchmark in 2008 and 2010, which resulted in the madrasah being barred from taking in Primary 1 students from 2012 to 2014. Aside from that, all madrasahs have been able to meet MOE’s benchmark. In fact, the PSLE results of madrasah students in the past two years have been extremely encouraging.

Through the efforts of the madrasah administrators and teachers and support from both MUIS and MOE, madrasahs have become private educational institutions that provide quality education to its students.

Although the MOE benchmark was born out of good intentions, it may cause undue stress for the madrasah administrators and teachers, as well as for madrasah students and their parents. This is because the MOE benchmark disallows a madrasah to take in Primary 1 pupils for three years if it fails to meet the benchmark. A madrasah that cannot take in new students may find it difficult to continue operating as a private education institution.

As such, I would like to ask MOE to work with MUIS and the madrasahs to review the necessity of this benchmark and to consider either removing it completely or easing the benchmark. Alternatively, instead of the two mentioned options, the Ministry could also consider issuing warnings to the madrasahs that do not meet the benchmark, accompanied by a requirement for them to conduct an independent audit of its practices. Sir, I would like to declare that I have a child who is studying in a full-time madrasah.

1.15 pm

Full Subject-based Banding

Mr Baey Yam Keng (Tampines): Chairman, full Subject Based Banding (SBB) was implemented in 28 Secondary schools from 2020. Students are grouped in different classes for both STEM and Humanities subjects, according to the levels at which students take them. When MOE announced this new arrangement, it was to provide students with a more customised learning experience according to their subject-specific strengths and interests and to empower students to take greater ownership of their learning.

May I ask the MOE what has the experience been in these 28 schools over the last two years? Have we been able to quantify and qualify the benefits enjoyed by the students? Although I hope that is not the main indicator of the performance of the programme, I would like to ask the Minister what is the proportion of students who have been able to move to a more demanding level?

I would also like to ask about the experience of teachers, Allied Educators and executive and administrative staff of the schools in running SBB. Unfortunately, SBB started around the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic. With students being grouped in different classes for different subjects, this might prove challenging when we are trying to minimise interactions in a school. I am aware that providing a safe learning environment is already taking a toll on everyone in school. I hope that our school staff well-being is also taken into consideration when SBB is being piloted and rolled out.

With these learnings, are we in good stead to progressively roll out SBB to more Secondary schools this year? The MOE has committed that from 2024, the Express, Normal (Academic) and Normal (Technical) courses will be removed. I welcome this move as it will do much to remove the stigmatisation of being in a less academically demanding stream. More importantly, it recognises and reminds us that each of us has different strengths, even among various academic subjects.

Promoting Use of Mother Tongue

Dr Wan Rizal (Jalan Besar): Chairman, based on the 2020 Population Census, more residents are using English as the most frequently used language at home, that is 48.3% in 2020 as compared to 32.3% in 2010. Unfortunately, this means that more residents are speaking less of their mother tongue at home.

Our ability to be bilingual or trilingual gives us a huge advantage when it comes to competing for jobs locally, regionally, globally, and this makes us an attractive business hub. Having a strong command of our mother tongue is not only important culturally, but also economically, if we want to stay relevant and remain ahead in the global competitive market.

Hence, I would like to ask the Ministry if there are any initiatives that students can get to expand their opportunities to learn about their mother tongue languages and culture, beyond exams.

Supporting Continuous Learning

Mr Yip Hon Weng (Yio Chu Kang): Mr Chairman, similar to Member Denise Phua, I agree with Minister Chan Chun Sing's speech on the three Cs that our universities should achieve: continual learning, connections and collaboration for value creation, and confidence building. And certainly, learning must not stop at a tertiary level. It needs to be a lifelong passion. However, the challenge ultimately lies in implementation. How do we track and monitor progress, both at the individual learner level and also at the societal level? What measurables do we use to define whether someone is a lifelong learner?

These days we try to avoid labels, but it is still important to have some tangible ways to determine whether the various programmes are effective. This is to help promote lifelong learning in our youth and prepare them for the new challenges ahead. What does this mean for IHLs in shells in terms of delivery of content and certification?

In the past, students were largely graded based on how they performed on paper. Assessments have since evolved over the years, with internships, project work, exchange programmes and 360° evaluations counting to their graduation results, but COVID-19 has nevertheless disrupted in-person learning and training. How will IHLs work with industry players to enhance the learning process for our students?

For most students, the hands-on work experience with industry stakeholders will be their first taste of formal working experience, so it should be a meaningful and enriching one. How do we encourage more on-the-job training (OJTs) with industry players? Lastly, are there other societies and countries that we are studying with regards to the best practises for continuous learning?

Mr Chairman: Ms Mariam Jaafar, you can take your two cuts together.

SkillsFuture

Ms Mariam Jaafar (Sembawang): Sir, for a lot of young Singaporeans, education, especially higher education, is a series of check the boxes. Choosing the best course they can get into, based on "cut-off points, study hard, get good grades, get a job". What is the Government doing to encourage young Singaporeans to explore opportunities and embrace the lifelong learning mindset from a young age, even while they are still in the formal education system. For example, taking part in boot camps outside of the university curriculum or during NS.

Will the Minister consider extending SkillsFuture credits to younger Singaporeans perhaps from the age of 18 or 21? My next cut.

Institutes of Higher Learning (IHLs) Partnerships

Globally, the world of education is transforming. Governments need to move away from the idea that they can educate and prepare our workforce of X number of graduates for the labour market, that has led to their configuration of schools, universities, polytechnics, ITEs and other institutions that we know today. Sir, education systems must evolve, every Singaporean will have his or her own lifelong learning journey, and there will be new forms of education to deliver learning at the right time, right context, right format as part of this journey

These education systems must be closely intertwined with work and delivered as part of digital ecosystems. Learning would include specific technical skills demanded by industry, but also digital skills, life skills, and as we work towards a greener future, sustainability skills. How can the Government encourage our IHLs to strengthen partnership with industries and develop these ecosystems, in order to better serve their evolving role in higher education and continual learning?

Supporting Instructors, Coaches and Students

Mr Edward Chia Bing Hui (Holland-Bukit Timah): Mr Chairman, Sir, I would like to declare that I am an advisor to the National Instructors and Coaches Association, an association formed by the NTUC. As CCAs are essential to students holistic education through the discovery and development of talents, interests, characters and values, our MOE instructors and coaches play a significant role in this aspect. Throughout this pandemic, MOE instructors and coaches who experienced difficulties in conducting CCAs in schools, COVID-19 uncertainties surfaced the issues of pay-per-use contracting model.

As a result of the pay-per-use contracting model, many CCA instructors had to leave the industries as it is no longer viable with the number of paid CCA hours greatly reduced. It is indeed heartening that there is an implementation of a new contract mode that ensures a minimum level of commitment towards contracted CCA hours. This was a result of discussions between MOE and National Instructors and Coaches Association (NICA) last year.

NICA appreciates MOE's intervention, especially given a time when MOE had to implement various learning modes due to the evolving COVID-19 situation. NICA hopes to foster this dialogue and partnership further with the common goal of providing high-quality CCAs for the holistic development of our students. I believe we can achieve more.

Firstly, the existing practice of most schools procuring service in the last month of the year means that contract opportunities are bunched up, resulting in instructors bidding for different schools’ CCA contracts simultaneously. As a result, some instructors and coaches may win multiple contracts. For those with too many contracts, they are forced to withdraw their bids. Often, this creates a delay in CCA start date, as affected schools then have to issue new Invitations to Quote (ITQs) with a later award. This affects students’ CCA learning outcomes and opportunities.

Secondly, contract terms are usually one to two years. Instead of a short-term period, which increases the chances of disruptions to students’ learning experience, I propose a term that is based on key milestones and development runway for events such as National School Games (NSG) and Singapore Youth Festival (SYF). This ensures that MOE instructors and coaches are able to design and execute structured programmes based on the development runway for NSG or SYF which often takes more than a year to train for. In this way, students can be assured of learning with a clear structured runway.

Thirdly, I seek MOE to recognise instructors’ value of work through intellectual property and copyrights. The curriculum created and proposed by the instructors and coaches should be the intellectual property owned by them. Being a key stakeholder in the education ecosystem, instructors and coaches are nurturing partners that can be counted to support schools, teachers, and students.

I would like to recommend that MOE partners closely with NICA to enhance the development and delivery of high quality CCAs. Through this partnership, I believe our children will benefit from a balanced and well-rounded education that is aligned to MOE’s mission.

Professional Development of Teachers

Mr Darryl David: Chairman, a strong education system is built around a few key pillars, one of which is to have passionate educators who are committed to bring out the best in every learner. Educators who not only teach textbook knowledge but also bring with them different perspectives and experiences that can enhance the learning of our learners.

I believe that our MOE educators are committed professionals who have been given very good preparatory training that equipped them with the academic and pedagogical development knowledge, as well as with classroom management skills before they are deployed to teach in our schools. That said, that continuous professional development is very important, especially in the area of pastoral skills.

Today, teachers not only have to deliver and teach, Chairman, they also have to manage the emotional and mental well-being of students and deal with interactions with parents, which are likely to be outside regular classroom hours. These are chronic stressors that might negatively impact the mental well-being of teachers, especially sustained over a prolonged period.

I would like to encourage MOE to consider how we can better equip our educators with stress management and self-care techniques, so that they can better manage their own mental and emotional wellness.

Another area where I hope MOE can consider is how to enrich the learning experience of our students, by encouraging educators with more diverse backgrounds to join the profession, or to ensure that our educators have diverse exposures, so that they can bring additional perspectives to the curriculum that they teach.

Many educators went straight into the teaching service from NIE out of a passion for wanting to educate young minds and to serve the community through education. As such, many of them might not have had much opportunity or exposure to other industries or professional environments before they become teachers.

It would thus be good if MOE could explore industry attachments, not only for the teachers’ own personal and professional development, but also so that they can contextualize the subjects that they are teaching in the classrooms to the students.

So, could MOE please share if there are such plans for the professional and holistic development and training of our educators?

Support for Educators' Mental Well-being

Dr Wan Rizal: Chairman, I began my career as a teacher more than 20 years ago, and have taught at various levels from Primary to Secondary schools, Polytechnics and University. Like many of my fellow educators, what keeps us going is our love for teaching.

The joy of curating lessons and imparting knowledge to students is hard to describe.

But being an educator it not just about teaching. The inconvenient truth is, educators wear many hats. They are administrators, disciplinarians, confidantes, counsellors, peer support advisors, CCA coaches and managers, amongst others. And certain hats require them to work beyond their work hours.

In my recent Budget speech, I mentioned about the need for individuals to undergo phases to re-invent themselves, to prevent them from going through physical and mental burnouts. I also believe that it is important to expose educators to new and different opportunities beyond their teaching scope.

This experience will rejuvenate them and help them to inject fresh ideas into their work. Thus, I would like to ask, how is the Ministry supporting and managing teachers' well-being? And this includes the deployment and workload as well as defining clear working hours and discourage educators from responding to emails and texts so that they are well rested mentally and physically.

Mr Chairman: Mr Louis Ng, you can take your three cuts together.

Improve Teachers' Ranking System

Mr Louis Ng Kok Kwang (Nee Soon): Sir, We should be fair to our teachers when reviewing their performance. In my Budget speech last year, I called for a performance management system or stack-ranking to be more standardised, transparent, fair and informative for teachers. We have done a lot for our students, we stopped ranking them and comparing them to their peers during PSLE, we tell them learning is not a competition. Why then do we make teaching a competition?

It seems contradictory that teachers are the ones telling students that students are no longer ranked and compared with their peers when they themselves are ranked and compared with other teachers. MOE has bee engaging teachers on improving the performance management systems. After one year of further engagement, I hope MOE will remove the quota for grades, provide objective criteria for certain performance grades, starting with A, C and E; remove punitive implications of getting lower grades and allow for professional development leaves for those who get C- grades.

1.30 pm

Like our students, our teachers deserve a nurturing environment. My next cut.

Reduce Workload of Teachers

Teachers wear many hats from teaching the curriculum, to holistic development, CCAs, and now COVID-19 regulations. We keep adding to teachers’ workload, but we still expect the same quality output from them.

A 2019 study already found that working hours of Singapore teachers is higher than the OECD average. The working hours have increased over the pandemic and our overstretched teachers are reaching out for help.

The average number of teachers seeking support through MOE's counselling services has almost doubled from before COVID-19.

Teachers shared with me that they are stressed and overworked. One shared, "Many teachers are burning out, but seeking help is not an option because we are expected to show up for our students. I’ve had multiple anxiety attacks in school but I have to put up a front to go back to class."

Will MOE consider setting limits for teachers’ working hours and workload? Other than enhancing the Parents Gateway, reducing coverage of national exams, removing some school-based exams, how else will MOE reduce teachers’ workloads? Next cut.

Ensure All Teachers Have Flexi-work Arrangements

Like many of us, teachers should enjoy flexible work arrangements (FWAs). Many are parents themselves. They prepare and send their children to school every morning before rushing to their own school. As a parent myself, I experience this chaos every morning.

Some teachers struggled with this, including my resident who told me that her principal does not allow her to have staggered working hours. On the other hand, I know of teachers who do and I used to take the elevator every morning with a teacher who sends his child to school before going to his school late.

We should ensure consistency across schools and all teachers should have FWAs, including staggered working hours.

Another teacher shared with me about flexible working hours for teachers without children. She shared that her school allowed her to leave school after 11.30 am if there are no matters in school. However, another school only allow teachers to leave after 2.30 pm even if they have classes before that.

Can MOE require all schools to offer FWAs, including staggered working hours and allow teachers to leave as long as there are no matters to take care of in school?

Nurturing Leaders for Tomorrow

Shawn Huang Wei Zhong (Jurong): It is important to have diverse experiences. A carefully curated learning experience will enable students to better understand local and regional culture, traditions, work ethics, people and history. We must also ensure that sufficient amount of time is spent in the region to enable one to form an assessment and better understanding of the region, develop useful engagements and relationships that would enable them to build up familiarity and courage to further engage the region in the future.

How is the Ministry strengthening the diversity of experiences to better understand culture, people and history of the region? How can we give everyone an opportunity to have a immersive overseas experience?

The Chairman: Ms Sylvia Lim. Not here. Mr Leon Perera.

Understanding Socio-economic Status Trends in Education

Mr Leon Perera (Aljunied): Mr Chairman, I filed a Parliamentary Question last November, asking for data on the socio-economic backgrounds of students admitted into different categories of Secondary schools, such as Government, Government-aided and Independent categories. I wanted to find out the extent to which students from well-off families were concentrated in the more popular and well resourced group of schools. While the Government gave a response describing the school admissions process, it did not release the data I asked for.

I unsuccessfully attempted to file a follow-up question this January asking if MOE possesses this data. The question was not allowed on grounds of repetition.

In 2018, Prime Minister Lee acknowledged the fears of popular schools becoming closed circles.

Sir, I repeat my call for the data to be released as a measure of how we are faring on diversity and inclusivity if we are serious about recognising and tackling school-based socio-economic status (SES) trends which may have profound consequences for social mobility. Note that I am asking for data on SES by category of schools and not by each individual school.

The Chairman: Ms Carrie Tan. She is not here. Mr Shawn Huang.

Nurturing Confident Resilient Learners

Mr Shawn Huang Wei Zhong: We need to strengthen the support for mental well-being. We need more early warning capabilities to identify students who need support and to be able to provide these capabilities much earlier. As mental well-being cuts across various domains, we must be able to coordinate our approach together with other stakeholders and parents. We must be able to respond appropriately with a range of responses and capabilities.

I would like to ask Minister how are we better supporting the mental well-being of students? How are we building up capabilities to build conducive and supportive environments for higher ends students? How are we assuring that we are nurturing students with special needs today and equip them with skills for life?

Education for a Skills-based Economy

Mr Sharael Taha (Pasir Ris-Punggol): Mr Chairman, former Manpower Minister Mr Lim Swee Say once mentioned should Singapore be hit by higher employment, it would be because of a shortage of skills as a result of the widening of job skills mismatch – and not a lack of jobs.

How is our education system preparing our students for employment in the skills-based economy?

For students in our ITE or Polytechnics, can the Ministry consider apprenticeship schemes where students can work with experienced staff from industry partners for a longer duration, as compared to internships so that they can learn job specific skills and gain applied competency?

Given the digital nature of all jobs now, how do we ensure all our students leave our education system with skills to perform at least tech-light roles? Can we consider coding, dashboarding or data visualisation as a core skillset for our students to acquire before they leave Secondary schools?

Enhancing Polytechnic and ITE Pathways

Dr Wan Rizal: Chairman, there are many ways for an admission to the Polytechnics. Apart from the Joint Admission Exercise (JAE), there is also the Early Admissions Exercise (EAE) for graduating "O" level students, who receive conditional offers based on their aptitudes and interests before taking their GCE "O" levels.

The Direct Admissions Exercise (DAE) allows applicants who are not eligible to participate in the EAE and JAE to apply for the course of their interest. And finally, there is the Polytechnic Foundation Programme (PFP), a one-year programme that accepts Normal (Academic) students.

I have witnessed many students from the PFP programme as well as those from the ITEs, and they are doing just as well as or even better than their "O" level counterparts.

Sir, as a whole, I am grateful that we allow the Polytechnics greater flexibility to select students from varied pathways, based on broader measures of merit, beyond just academic grades. But I think we can do more. We can do more to continue to change mindsets and show that truly, there are multiple paths to success.

There are several questions that I would like to raise.

Firstly, would the Ministry consider expanding admission to Polytechnics via the PFP, in a move to continue to broaden the definition of academic merit and results beyond what was achieved in the national examinations?

Second, for students enrolling in Polytechnics from the ITEs, are there plans to introduce industry attachments prior to this admission so that they are better prepared before they embark in the diploma programme?

And finally, for students who need more time to build up their academic foundation, what are some of the options for them to be eligible to enrol in Polytechnic courses based on their non-academic achievements?

Enhancing ITE Graduates' Employability

Dr Shahira Abdullah (Nominated Member): In the latest graduate employment survey for 2021, it was found that more university graduates secured full-time employment, with salaries also increasing as Singapore’s economy recovered. It was found to be "comparable to pre-COVID-19 levels". The Polytechnics have also shown improvements in employment rates and salaries. However, the results for ITE have not been released.

May I know if MOE has an employment survey for ITE graduates? And if that is available, what are the employment rates and starting salaries? Has it improved over the year, or rebounded to pre-COVID-19 levels? What is the percentage of ITE graduates who have furthered their studies instead?

I understand there are many traineeships available currently for these young graduates. However, may I know the rate of conversion to full-time employment for the ITE graduates and if they are comparable to those from Polytechnics and Universities? For those who have been unable to convert, what are the reasons cited by the ITE graduates as well as the companies themselves? Should there be initiatives to encourage companies to hire ITE graduates?

It is of concern to me as if these graduates are not able to get decent-paying full-time employment, many of them might turn to gig work, especially if they have to help with their family finances. The longer they stay in gig work, the more difficult it will be for them to get out.

IHLs

Mr Abdul Samad (Nominated Member): Chairman, my focus on Institutes of Higher Learning (IHLs) is more towards both Institute of Technical Education and Polytechnics.

Our country education landscape and system of IHLs had evolved over the past few decades since I last completed my Diploma in 1992 from Singapore Polytechnic.

I am very heartened to see the increase and Improvement not just for Polytechnics, but even in converting them – from Vocational Institute of Training Board to one that is more encouraging: Institute of Technical Education, in short ITE. Since this change, can MOE share how many students have graduated yearly and how fast do they actually get employment?

I also note that there are many ITE students that choose to continue to acquire Diploma upon graduation before entering their work life. Can MOE share how many students have gone through prior this route after taking the Higher Nitec straightaway into Diploma?

Aside from ITE, the number of Polytechnics has increased gradually from two to five now. Can MOE share how many graduates annually from such Polytechnic across the five different ones?

Notwithstanding, the thing that is more of concern is how are the courses curated so that it can meet the industry demands? How often are these courses reviewed and even new courses curated, to meet potential demands of the future job market?

Does MOE also work closely with EDB to ensure that we have sufficient required talents to meet the future economy and industry demand so that we can build a Singaporean Core in our workforce and also provide good global job opportunities?

In addition, I also call MOE to work closely with NTUC via our young NTUC team so that these students can have a teaser on work-life and from then on learn the need for continuous learning in their future career.

Continuing Education and Training

Ms Foo Mee Har (West Coast): Chairman, I would like to declare my interest as CEO of WMI, a continuing education and training (CET) provider.

Much has been said about the rapid pace of industry development and how jobs are fast evolving. This means the acquisition of new skills and knowledge must keep pace and even intensify over our lifetime. It is timely that we think about how CET can be even more impactful and emerge as a strategic pillar in our human capital development.

Sir, for CET to be more impactful to support lifelong learning with clear career outcomes, CET's funding, operating and accreditation framework need to be further enhanced.

Based on MOE’s estimated expenditure for Financial Year 2022, about $1.3 billion will be spent on SkillsFuture-related programmes. This represents about less than 10% of the total MOE Expenditure. Yet this amount is supposed to support 2.4 million resident working adults, averaging $542 per worker. This contrasts starkly with the amount of about $16,000 per child up to Secondary level and about $22,000 per full-time University student. What would be a more reasonable amount of CET spend per adult to achieve the outcomes we intend? What about the contribution we should expect from employers?

Sir, besides budget, we need to think about how we can enable workers to engage in deep learning while they work. One of the struggles we often hear from working adults is that it is already hard enough to cope with the day’s work, let alone set aside time to learn new skills.

1.45 pm

CET can take place in different ways, both online and offline, on campus as well as at the workplace. How can we support workers, integrate Continuing Education and Training to their work, including the provision of study leave as part of employment terms?

Sir, CET must be relevant with credentials recognised by employers and the industry. The credentials from CET must translate to job opportunities and career growth. For this to happen, there must be close partnerships among CET providers, employers and the industry to agree on industry accreditation standards and the recognition of a common set of CET qualifications.

Mr Darryl David: Mr Chairman, education and personal development is indeed a lifelong journey. This axiom is now more apt than ever.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0 was coined by Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum in 2016 to describe how the confluence of artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, Internet of Things, quantum computing, genetic engineering and other technologies will create the perfect storm that paves the way for radical transformative changes in the conduct of businesses and how we live our lives.

Today, we are barely five years from that and into the Industry 4.0 and futurists and academics have already begun to describe how the Fifth Industrial Revolution, Industry 5.0, will look like. As one consulting group has aptly described, Industry 5.0 is the new renaissance for humanity where humanism, civility, inclusivity, creativity and purpose will thrive alongside profit and digitally enabled progress.

Think metaverse and you get the picture.

Singapore needs to prepare our workforce for Industry 5.0 and beyond. Our educational institutions have traditionally focused on Pre-Employment Training (PET) to prepare our young for work. Compared to a few years ago, it is now becoming even clearer that getting a basic education is a necessary but insufficient condition for work in Industry 5.0 and beyond. We need to develop a new educational framework that integrates PET with Continuing Education and Training (CET) to meet the new reality of work.

Chairman, MOE has traditionally focused on PET and CET has typically been the domain of SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG) and Workforce Singapore (WSG). Moving forward, would we see a closer integration between the PET and CET frameworks so we can develop a future-ready workforce that is equipped with basic know-hows as well as the mindset that training and development is a lifelong journey, especially in Industry 5.0 and beyond?

How could MOE, SSG and WSG work together to re-conceptualise how the education landscape will look like in Singapore? Thank you.

Expanding Pathways and Opportunities

Mr Shawn Huang Wei Zhong: Being relevant to the industry is of utmost importance to strengthen employability and continued employment. Mid-career upgrades and continued learning is not an easy feat as one usually has to manage multiple obligations.

I know of many who will take time after a long day of work to attend classes or courses. We have a duty of care to them. We must make sure that their efforts will be accretive to their careers and to their personal development.

I would like to ask the Minister how is MOE expanding applied learning opportunities in its Institutes of Higher Learning (IHLs) and to ensure that courses are highly relevant to the industry's needs? How is MOE measuring the value of the certification or programme post its completion? How does MOE ensure compatibility or stackability of courses toward an academic or professional certification?

Special Education Schools for the Future

Ms Denise Phua Lay Peng: Sir, there are 22 Special Education (SPED) schools in Singapore catering to about 7,000 students with moderate to high support needs. The Government has invested resources, manpower and funds into the sector and many of us are grateful.

There are three compelling reasons why it is time for SPED schools to be elevated, to be uplifted to be more prepared for the future.

One is the incredulous pace at which technology has changed lives at home, at work and out in the community.

Two, the need for better education outcomes. The prognosis of SPED graduates is not as positive as expected in spite of more MOE funding, more MOE controls, more pay and more seconded MOE mainstream principals and teachers. We need a breakthrough in the SPED education system for higher returns in the form of physical wellness, literacy, numeracy, community living and independent living skills as a result of a SPED education career.

Three, the need to continue learning for life and throughout life is even more critical and urgent for students with special needs. SPED school graduands literally stop learning after they leave the school gate.

In a complex, rapidly digital, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world, the Government must facilitate the transit of SPED schools to become better schools for the future. Let me propose five features.

One, SPED schools of the future must be scoped to cover lifelong learning – to learn for life and to learn throughout life. Special education can no longer be about frontloading content in the first 18 years of one's life. Learning must extend beyond 18 to avoid the falling off the cliff with no hope of any more education.

Two, SPED schools of the future must be masters of their mission. No lip service to SPED basics like person-centred planning, individual education planning and other aspects of disability-specific curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. SPED schools must become truly schools without walls and strongly facilitate learning at home, in the community, at the workplace and care facilities – just in time, self-paced and appropriately paced, bite-sized, with repositories of learning resources which are easily accessible.

Three, SPED schools of the future must develop strong thought leadership and practice to the extent that it can guide and inform the support of students with special education needs (SEN) in mainstream schools – in MOE schools. In education systems elsewhere, educators with strong expertise in SPED are better regarded and even better paid. Singapore has only begun its journey in building expertise in special education. With 80% of students with special education needs in Singapore's mainstream schools, SPED schools can become the precious resource to uplift them.

To reach this leadership position, the National Institute of Education, NIE, the mothership that now trains special educators, will need to upgrade and update its current service model. Set up a Special Education Academy for that.

Four, SPED schools of the future should be led not just by MOE but by a SPED Leadership Council at the national level comprising many strong helping hands, with members who can represent the ecosystem of SPED – the Government, disability and education experts, family representatives and the industry.

SPED schools of the future should be trusted. They should not be managed in a cookie-cutter way. They should be trusted to deliver according to the outcomes agreed upon. SPED schools of the future should not be micromanaged and those who are competent and have a proven track record should be given more autonomy and space to innovate, to experiment and to break new grounds, just as how MOE has allowed for the autonomy of schools and IHLs in the mainstream.

Lastly, SPED schools of the future must actively partner and enskill family caregivers in the education of their students, of their children. Parents or caregivers will play an active role in the education of their own children. They will not wait till when they or their children become much older to worry about their unpreparedness for life or life after the parents' death.

In conclusion, Sir, it is time to lift Singapore's SPED Schools to the next lap. The time is now.

Special Needs Education

Mr Gerald Giam Yean Song (Aljunied): Parents of children with special needs face a complex dilemma when making educational choices for their children. A wide range of services is available at various price points but parents are largely left on their own to identify the optimal ones.

Could ECDA provide more one-stop advisory services for parents? This will help ease the anxiety that many parents of special needs children feel.

For children who require medium to high levels of early intervention support, such services can be prohibitively expensive. While ECDA does provide subsidised support through the Early Intervention Programme for Infants & Children (EIPIC) programme, EIPIC centres have wait times ranging from three to 18 months and most provide a limited number of hours of intervention a week. This requires parents to turn to additional services that can cost thousands more every month.

Can ECDA work with EIPIC providers to increase the capacity and range of services provided so that children can receive all the early intervention support they require from the same centre? A centralised provision of early intervention services can bring economies of scale which can reduce costs for parents.

Children who require lower levels of early intervention support can attend mainstream Primary schools but may still require supplemental support services like occupational therapy.

Can MOE provide an integrated special needs support programme at mainstream schools? This will enable children with special needs to thrive in such environments and reduce the cost and inconvenience borne parents for external support services.

Enhancing Support for Students with Special Educational Needs

Ms Rahayu Mahzam (Jurong): Like other parents, parents of children with special needs like me also want to see our children do well in school and achieve their fullest potential. The education journey, though, is often a lot more challenging.

The children are differently abled and require more support. If we intervene early in schools and give them the necessary skills to prepare them for the future, there is a greater chance that many of them could carry on with their lives with minimal reliance on others and work and socialise like everyone else.

If they can be independent and contribute meaningfully towards the economy, less resources need to be spent on support structures or schemes when they are adults or when they age. It is thus important to have the appropriate educational pathways for these students to prepare them well so that they can integrate and contribute to society.

Schools offer the support structure for parents in their children's developmental journey. The challenge for parents sometimes is in getting to the services they need, in enrolling in appropriate schools which are within the vicinity of their homes.

Special Education (SPED) schools play a key function in the special needs community. How can we continue to enhance the accessibility and affordability of SPED schools?

It is also particularly challenging for families as their children move on to different stages of their developments. We should continue to build on the efforts to support special needs students as they transit into the various milestones in their lives.

MOE had previously announced Transition Support for Integration or TRANSIT to help children ease the transition into Primary school. Could I get an update on the implementation of TRANSIT and find out if there are any plans on the expansion of this programme?

Support for Students' Mental Well-being

Dr Wan Rizal: Chairman, last year, we were rocked by the unfortunate loss of life in school during school hours. The incident impacted many – students, educators and parents. Inevitably but most unfortunately, the issue of mental health was brought to light.

Our educators are trained to look out for signs of distress amongst their students and mental well-being is taught in the curriculum. There is also a peer support programme to bridge the gap. However, as an educator and a peer support coordinator, I find that it is not easy to identify these students.

I have had students coming up to me and sharing their difficulties and I in turn, in confidence, make subtle arrangements to accommodate such students. But often, they go totally unnoticed or students and parents are aware but would like to keep their issues private. It is understandable.

Over the past two years, I have asked for mental health literacy programmes, screening both physical and mental as well as time-outs to be introduced. I am grateful that Character Citizenship Education (CCE) now covers the literacy aspect and I hope that the Ministry can integrate screening as well as time-outs.

I would like to ask, Sir, what are some of MOE's plans to enhance support for firstly, students who have yet to be identified to suffer from mental health issues and secondly, students who are suffering from mental health and well-being problems in schools and at home or outside?

The Chairman: Minister Chan Chun Sing.

The Minister for Education (Mr Chan Chun Sing): Chairman, we thank Members for their suggestions and the support for our education system and especially our educators. Let us also thank our educators on the frontline.

In the past two years of COVID-19 disruptions, they have taken on additional workload and have gone beyond the call of duty to keep our children safe, our schools open and our learning undisrupted.

2.00 pm

COVID-19 has accelerated many trends and heightened the need to evolve our education system urgently. Mr Patrick Tay and Ms Denise Phua also spoke about the future trends of education. We aim to emerge stronger from this pandemic. We will not waste the opportunities that have arisen from this crisis. We will lock in the gains from the disruptions to distinguish ourselves for the long term.

Chair, three driving forces shape our education system. First, technology and business cycles have become more compressed. Workers now take on multiple jobs in their lifetime and need to be reskilled regularly to remain relevant. How fast we evolve our skills, products and services will determine our competitive advantage, both as individuals and as a nation, much more than our population base or our resources.

Second, the world is becoming polarised and fragmented, even as we grow more inter-connected and inter-dependent. The geopolitical environment has become more volatile. Competition of ideas and values, contestation of ideologies and influence. Both will intensify. Countries that cannot create relevance for themselves will have to worry about having to choose sides. Yet, there are opportunities for those that can value-add and play the role of a connector to transcend these fault lines.

Third, our social fabric is evolving. Our people have more diverse aspirations and perspectives. The Internet has increased access to information but algorithms on social media can also skew the information that we are exposed to. They cater to our preferences and amplify our biases.

Our youths are not just Singaporeans, but also digital natives. Technology and social media have allowed them to stay connected and organise around meaningful causes. But it is also easier to compare themselves with their classmates and friends, as well as anyone else in the world online. This has an impact on their sense of identity and self-confidence.

We have seen other societies with longer histories fracture, as the values and aspirations of their people diverge. We are a young nation. Our challenges cannot be any less.

The definition of success for our education system must then evolve. It must enable every Singaporean to do justice to their own set of gifts; constantly seeking to surpass themselves both individually and as a team, rather than just surpassing others; contributing towards a better future for the wider community, to Singapore and to the world.

Chair, our vision of our education system has three elements: to develop confident Singaporeans; to build a competitive Singapore; and to forge a cohesive society.

Let me start with the first – confident Singaporeans. Confidence starts from understanding our own strengths and interests. This starts from school. Then, confidence comes from knowing that we have multiple pathways that give our people lifelong opportunities to acquire the knowledge and skills for success through life. We must also have confidence in our values and solutions, that we have the will and the means to chart our own destiny with our own solutions for our own context. Finally, we must be confident in our contributions to our society, to future generations and to the world.

Second, a competitive Singapore. This comes from our speed of evolution and our superior connectivity. Evolution speed depends on us quickly learning, unlearning and relearning, so that we can combine and recombine ideas and knowledge to always create something new and relevant. Superior connectivity enables us to go beyond geography and size, with the world as our hinterland and market.

By connectivity, I refer not just to the physical dimensions of air, land and sea, not even the non-physical dimensions of data, finance, rules and technology; but also of ideas, cultures and values. As the world threatens to fragment, we connect and value add. This connectivity is our special, man-made competitive advantage.

Third, a cohesive society. We distinguish ourselves as a nation that celebrates our diverse roots while forging a shared identity with a set of shared values. Our diversity unites, rather than divides. It is the substrate upon which our new ideas grow.

Therefore, Chair, we will take a life course approach to education. “MOE for schools" must become “MOE for life”.

We begin by giving every child a good start in life. The early years set the foundation for heathy and balanced development for our children. We have invested in many quality and affordable preschools, where our children can enjoy and learn through play, develop early literacy and numeracy, as well as social and emotional skills, ask questions and explore their interests, and most importantly – ignite their innate curiosity.

We are updating the Nurturing Early Learners Framework to guide our preschool educators, to incorporate social and emotional skills even more prominently and emphasise core values of respect, responsibility, care, and honesty from young.

As they progress through our schools, we build on these fundamentals by giving our students greater confidence in themselves and of their abilities, with more opportunities to explore their interests and cultivate their curiosity, so that they are unafraid to try. And if they fail, they pick themselves up and try again.

We cannot shield our children from all uncertainties and the imperfections of this world, nor should that be our aim. But we certainly can and want to equip them with the skills to manage the uncertainties and navigate the imperfections. This means creating time and space for our students to develop the life skills they need for success, including the ability to deal with failure, inventive thinking, adaptability and cross-cultural skills that Mr Darryl David and Mr Lim Biow Chuan raised.

Over the past few years, we removed mid-year examinations for Primary 3, Primary 5, Secondary 1 and Secondary 3. We saw the positive impact. Schools and teachers can better pace and deepen students’ learning. They use ongoing assessments to identify what students have mastered and the areas they have difficulties with. Students also focus more on their learning and less on marks.

We will build on these gains, by removing mid-year examinations for all Primary and Secondary levels by 2023. This frees up more time across all levels for self-directed learning and development of 21st Century Competencies. We are also reviewing curriculum content and assessment demand. Any one standard curriculum will necessarily not be able to meet the diverse learning needs of our students. Any "average curriculum" will necessarily mean that many students will be overstretched while others are under-stretched.

Hence, we must have a range of options to cater to our students' diverse abilities and learning needs. Our teachers must have the ability to pick and choose from a menu of options and customise them to suit the diverse and respective needs of their students. These moves seek to bring about a cultural shift: where our students learn holistically and master skills, driven by intrinsic motivation and future relevance, and not be distracted by incessant comparison with others.

Chair, next, we want to customise education as much as possible to bring out the best in every child. We will give students more agency in their learning. Regular Home-Based Learning will be implemented for all Secondary and pre-university students by end-2022. This lets students take ownership of their learning at their own pace. Students will also have dedicated time and space to pursue their own interests outside the curriculum through Student-Initiated Learning. And we are studying how technology can further customise learning to help teachers provide feedback, track students’ learning progress, and we will also explore the use of adaptive learning systems to tailor learning to our students’ needs.

We thank Ms Denise Phua and Ms Hazel Poa for suggesting a through-train system for Primary to Secondary school education. Ms Denise Phua has raised this idea for some time. The PSLE remains a useful checkpoint for our students and parents. We made significant changes to the PSLE scoring system last year, to broaden emphasis beyond academic results. We will continue to look at ways to enhance the diversity of our school landscape.

But there are some fundamental principles we must always maintain: to provide quality and holistic education for every child, no matter their learning profile; to give opportunities for children of different backgrounds to mix with one another to strengthen our social cohesion; and to ensure equity and fairness in admissions and posting.

In line with these principles, we will expand Full Subject-Based Banding (Full SBB) for more porous and diverse educational pathways and encourage students to take greater ownership of their education journey.

Mr Baey Yam Keng has asked for an update. Our Full SBB pilot started in 2020. In the pilot schools, students taking different courses come together in mixed form classes. They take six subjects at the common level, which is one-third of curriculum time and other subjects at different levels. The experiences from the pilot gives us confidence that we are on the right track. Students have made more friends across courses, learnt new perspectives and learnt how to relate better to their peers from different backgrounds. And they have become more confident in themselves and of their abilities.

From 2024, we will remove streaming totally. In Secondary schools, students will be grouped in mixed form classes. Students can choose to take different subjects at different subject levels, suited to their pace of learning. These subject levels, known as G for General: G1, G2 and G3. They are broadly mapped from today’s Express, Normal (Academic) and Normal (Technical) standards.

There will be greater subject-level flexibility. Those who are strong in a subject may take it at a more demanding level, while those who find it difficult to cope with a subject may offer it at a less demanding level, based on their school’s guidance.

We will also shift away from course-based subject offerings under Full SBB. For example, students currently in Express and Normal (Academic) courses who face exceptional difficulties with Mother Tongue Language (MTL) learning may take MTL "B". With Full SBB, they can now study MTL at a level that better meets their learning needs – whether G1 or G2. We will thus discontinue MTL "B" from the 2024 Secondary 1 cohort. MOE will provide more details later in the year on other curriculum changes that accompany Full SBB.

To allow more students to benefit, MOE will extend Full SBB to more schools. Crescent Girls’ School, Tanjong Katong Girls’ School and Tanjong Katong Secondary School currently admit only students in the Express stream. From 2024, they will go on board Full SBB and admit a wider range of students, including students taking mainly G2 subjects. Students of more diverse learning profiles can then benefit from these schools’ distinctive programmes.

Full SBB represents a major shift to customise learning to each student according to their strengths. However, I must say, Full SBB does require more resources. It entails more complex coordination of timetables and requires our teachers to adapt their teaching methods for a wider range of students.

Customisation also means giving schools the flexibility to best support their students' needs. Assoc Prof Jamus Lim spoke on later school start times. In MOE, we have a simple baseline – schools are not to start before 7.30 am. Beyond that, schools decide when to start and end, based on factors like their unique needs, student profiles and the local transport situation. For example, Junyuan Secondary School starts at 8.30 am twice a week and 8.00 am the other three days, and Junyuan Secondary is not the only school that has different start times.

We will also adjust post-secondary admissions, to better recognise students’ individual strengths. First, we will expand the Polytechnic Foundation Programme (PFP) and relax selected grade requirements for entry from Academic Year 2024. A wider group of learner profiles can benefit from a practice-based preparatory pathway to the polytechnics, while still ensuring that students can cope with the rigour. We expect another 200 students every year to benefit, in addition to the 1,500 today. We will continue to review admissions for other pathways to better recognise the different subject levels under Full SBB.

Next, we will expand Direct School Admission (DSA) for Government and Government-aided Junior Colleges (JCs). Starting from 2022, these JCs can admit up to 20% of their non-Integrated Programme intake through DSA, up from 10% today. This recognises other forms of merit beyond academic grades.

Our efforts to customise education continue after Secondary school. Last year, Second Minister for Education Dr Maliki Osman led the Review of Opportunities and Pathways in Applied Education. The review aims to enhance Polytechnic and ITE education to support our students’ diverse strengths and aspirations. Its recommendations include providing students with greater flexibility in their pathways and supporting them in navigating these pathways, enhancing their career readiness and resilience for the future economy and equipping them with life skills and expanding opportunities for deeper industry exposure. The Second Minister for Education will update more later.

We must also help our students to be curious about the world. Around two-thirds of our schools have established partnerships with their overseas counterparts. Building on this, we want every school to have an overseas partnership. This facilitates more student exchanges, so that students can broaden their horizons and learn about different cultures.

While the exchanges have been virtual for now, because of COVID-19, technology allows our students and their overseas peers to still learn, play and celebrate special occasions together.

2.15 pm

In this same spirit, our IHLs will continue to work towards the 70 by 70 target disrupted by COVID-19 – 70% of all students will have an overseas experience, of which 70% will be in ASEAN countries, China and India.

Chair, we will give our students greater confidence to venture beyond Singapore.

We will pilot a modular Third Language programme so that more Secondary school students can learn new languages and discover other cultures. Starting with one or two of our existing Third Language offerings, students can pick up the language from different starting points or at different levels and build their proficiency and "stack" modules towards a certificate.

At the same time, our students must have a sense of rootedness and identity.

As Dr Wan Rizal said, our bilingual ability helps us to navigate across cultures. Every student should learn their Mother Tongue to as high a level as possible. Hence, we have a range of Mother Tongue Language special programmes, like the Language Elective Programme (LEP), which we have expanded to our secondary schools in 2020. It allows those strong in their Mother Tongue to learn it at a higher level and nurture their interest in literature and culture.

The Elective Programme in Malay Language for Secondary Schools (EMAS) is another example. EMAS is offered at three host schools today. We will expand EMAS to a fourth host centre, Raffles Institution, from 2023 so that more students can access it, including students from other nearby schools. Students with a strong proficiency in the Malay language can develop their interest for the Malay language and culture.

Across the system, we continue to pay special attention to students with greater needs. They too must have the opportunities and resilience to overcome challenges and do well in life.

Our philosophy is this: no student should be held back from their dreams and aspirations because of his or her starting circumstances. So, we will press on with UPLIFT in schools, ITE and the Polytechnics to support students with Special Educational Needs and to support the mental well-being of our students. My MOE colleagues will elaborate.

Chair, this is our social compact – to continually invest in our people, enable every Singaporean to develop to their fullest potential regardless of their starting point and to partake in the country's growth so that we can strive towards a fairer and more inclusive society.

Previously, we have focused on investing in the first 20 to 25 years of our people's lives. On average, we spend a quarter of a million dollars on each child to prepare him or her for their first job. But now, firms and workers face greater disruption and faster skills obsolescence. Therefore, upfront investment is necessary but insufficient.

On the other hand, beyond paper qualifications, those with the relevant skills, who can take advantage of the new technologies, will benefit the most. Therein lies our challenge and opportunity.

Therefore, we will need to seriously intensify efforts on continual learning throughout life, as Mr Yip Hon Weng and Ms Mariam Jaafar mentioned.

The Government started SkillsFuture seven years ago. In 2021, we spent nearly $1.2 billion in skills training for our workforce. This is 40% more than 2019 and it excludes spending on COVID-19-related programmes.

We will do more to support Singaporeans to achieve greater career resilience and job mobility through a major investment in skills refresh. This will be the next needle-mover for the competitiveness of our people beyond their first work-ready qualification. This will become a key pillar of our social compact with Singaporeans we will invest in every Singaporean not just in school but throughout life.

We are focusing on two areas: providing more opportunities for our people to pursue a degree or diploma, especially as working adults, and enhancing structural support for mid-career reskilling.

Today, we have a 40% cohort participation rate target for subsidised university places for fresh school leavers and an additional 10% allowance for adult learners. As we increasingly move towards interspersing working and learning throughout life, we should look beyond the proportion of each cohort that goes to university before starting work. We should focus instead on ensuring that Singaporeans can upskill continually according to their needs and aspirations.

This ties in with major efforts to transform our economy. The refresh of the Industry Transformation Maps (ITM) aims to create more good jobs for Singaporeans. With more and better job opportunities for degree holders, we will study increasing the "lifetime cohort participation rate". This will provide more opportunities for working adults to pursue a degree at a suitable point in their life and support key growth areas in our economy.

MOE, together with MTI and MOM, will further study the mix of the increase in places to better cater to the needs of our learners and the economy.

Beyond expanding degree places, we need other ways to strengthen support for our mid-career workers, especially those in their forties and fifties. They are more vulnerable to retrenchment and long-term unemployment and need greater support to pivot to new job roles. This structural change is here to stay post-pandemic.

During the pandemic, to help mid-career individuals move to new sectors or job roles, we introduced the SGUnited Skills (SGUS) and SGUnited Mid-Career Pathways – Company Training (SGUP-CT) programmes. We will bring these programmes to a close and transit to a new SkillsFuture Career Transition Programme (SCTP).

This will be a permanent feature of our training and placement ecosystem. Courses under SCTP will be highly subsidised. The SCTP will support the career transition needs of Singaporeans, with industry-relevant training involving potential employers, and employment facilitation into sectors with good hiring opportunities. Minister of State Gan Siow Huang will elaborate later.

Beyond these moves, MOE, MTI, MOM and MOF are studying how we can enhance the structural support for Singaporeans in their mid-forties and fifties who may need significant reskilling to provide a second wind to their careers.

Regardless if our workers are looking to switch industries or jobs, they recognise that their current jobs need upgraded skills to keep pace with evolving business models and technologies. Reskilling can help them to keep up with the changes and remain employable.

We will take a holistic review of the accessibility and the different support that adult learners need, to help every Singaporean enhance their career resilience by refreshing their skills throughout life.

Chair, we need to strengthen and transform our higher education and training ecosystem. Rather than simply ramping up quantity, we must also enhance quality and accessibility. We must accelerate the transformation of our training to better cater to adult learners, leveraging on technology to enable every individual to learn at their own pace, anytime and anywhere.

We will improve how we reach out to individuals and support their upskilling as they pursue their career goals through new partnerships with companies, trade associations and chambers and of course, our unions.

All three pillars of our ecosystem, our institutes for continual learning, private training providers and employers, all must pull together in the same direction. Let me elaborate.

First, our Institutes of Higher Learning must grow into institutes for continual learning. While the number of adult learners trained by our institutions has more than doubled from around 165,000 in 2018 to 345,000 in 2020, we can expect this number to go up further.

To cater to more diverse learners, our institutions need to review their programmes. Adults' learning needs, commitments and prior experiences differ from our younger learners. This means improving andragogy, or adult education by using technology to make learning accessible and achievable and making learning bite-sized and on-the-go based on their existing skills foundation.

For instance, SUSS's flexible, modular and applied curriculum, accompanied by online provisions, caters well to adult learners. The curriculum is taught by a mix of SUSS full-time and associate faculty, many of whom are industry practitioners. It is supported by learning analytics to tailor learning to individual students.

New pathways are also being created, like SIT's new Competency-based Workplace Learning Pathway. Skills and competencies acquired through prior work experience also count towards the graduating requirements. This brings the university to the workplace.

All our institutions also offer stackable pathways for learners to take bite-sized modules that count towards a full qualification. This gives our adult learners more flexibility to juggle work, study and family responsibilities.

Second, we need a stronger nexus between our institutions and industry, as Ms Mariam Jaafar suggested. Industry and workforce transformation must go hand-in-hand. Our institutions need to do so in three ways.

First, partnering industry to provide more workplace learning opportunities. For example, internships, job-shadowing or work-study programmes.

By 2025, work-study programmes will be a mainstream pathway catering to 12% of each cohort, up from 4% today. We will support industry partners to develop in-house on-the-job training capabilities through the National Centre of Excellence for Workplace Learning. Industry can also offer industry micro-credentials that are recognised by employers alongside our institutions' credentials.

Two, ensuring that our institutions' faculty remain industry relevant. We must encourage faculty to gain industry-relevant knowledge and competencies and most importantly, to keep them current. Our institutions will ramp up industry engagement and attachment opportunities and hire faculty with industry experience to complement existing faculty.

Three, collaborating with industry on research and innovation projects.

We will provide additional support to our Centres engaging in Technology, Innovation and Enterprise activities in our Polytechnics and ITE. They can then partner more SMEs on innovation projects and that will allow our SMEs and companies to be a ready receptacle for our upgraded workers and upgraded students.

Our companies also need to take ownership of this transformation because transforming themselves to attract, retain and upskill local talent is an important piece of this jigsaw puzzle.

Over the past year, MOE, MTI, and MOM initiated efforts with industry leaders, unions and other Government agencies, and educators to strengthen the employability and career prospects of our Polytechnic and ITE graduates in the future economy.

We looked into raising the quantity and quality of internships and on-the-job upskilling opportunities for our students, starting with sectors like Manufacturing, Built environment, Information and Communications Technology (ICT), Retail and Food Services. We have developed strategies to promote access to jobs with good career prospects.

We have encouraged companies to recognise the skills and competencies of our Polytechnic and ITE graduates and invest in talent attraction and retention and also to invest in their workers' continued education. Good internship experiences and progression pathways are key to encouraging our students to join and stay in the sector they were trained for.

Some of these initiatives were announced at the recent MCI's and MTI's Committees of Supply, such as the TechSkills Accelerator (TeSA) for ITE and Polytechnics Aliiance, and the Accelerated Pathways for Technicians & Assistant Engineers (Manufacturing) Grant.

Chair, MOE cannot transform our education system by ourselves. We need and want to partner educators, parents, industry and our community to achieve this vision.

First, our educators. Mr Darryl David, Dr Wan Rizal and Mr Louis Ng have spoken about them.

To inspire our students, we need to inspire our teachers. To widen the exposure for our students, we need to widen the exposure for our teachers. To empower our teachers to steward change, we will partner with the people, public and private sectors so that teachers can take up more short-term attachments.

Through the Teacher Work Attachment Plus programme, our teachers can broaden their perspectives, enhance their skills and build connections. Our teachers must then be able to grow and they must grow as they help our children grow.

Many Polytechnic and ITE educators have prior working experiences from our industry. However, we also need to help them keep pace amidst the current fast changes in the industry. We will therefore send more Polytechnic and ITE educators for industry attachments and for more of them to have collaboration projects with our companies, including many SMEs. This will refresh their skill sets and keep their competencies at the frontier.

Our educators have worked much harder and for much longer hours in the last two years.

In MOE, we have a saying, "One cannot pour from an empty cup." Hence, we will continue to take care of our teachers' mental well-being and workload.

Schools are committed to ensuring that workload remains manageable and we will continue to work towards all schools having Wellness Ambassadors. To strengthen the culture of care and peer support for our teachers, Staff Well-Being Committees will place more emphasis on the mental well-being of our teachers, with support from MOE headquarters. These efforts complement free in-house counselling services at iCARE and the free 24/7 whole-of-Government counselling hotline.

2.30 pm

Mr Louis Ng also asked about teachers’ appraisal. We appreciate his concern for their well-being. Our teachers are driven by a strong sense of mission and responsibility for our students, and it shows in their work and attitude. Therefore, it is important for us to recognise and affirm deserving teachers, especially those who have gone beyond their call of duty, those who have excelled, and those who have set the pace for the fraternity.

At the same time, we need to identify teachers who require more support, so that we can build and sustain an excellent workforce. Our appraisal system must, therefore, ensure consistency and fairness in the ranking of our educators. Mr Louis Ng can be assured that we are constantly updating our policies so that all our teachers can continue to have access to our training programmes and be guided to improve, to better nurture our students.

We also hear Mr Edward Chia’s call to support instructors and coaches. MOE and our partners, like SportSG, the National Arts Council and the National Instructors & Coaches Association, recognise the important role they play. We have platforms for regular engagements and have been working closely with them, including reviewing our procurement processes and contractual terms to mitigate the impact of COVID-19, and we will continue to do so.

Our second group of partners are our parents. As Dr Tan Yia Swam said earlier, all of us want the best for our children. But our definition of success must evolve beyond just getting good grades in examinations. Let us help our children acquire skills based on their interests and strengths that will allow them to have a unique value proposition when they join the workforce. This strengthens their value proposition, our collective diversity and resilience.

Let us work together to support the well-being and development of our children – not to chase after the marginal last mark, instil fear of failure, or excessively compare our children’s achievements with others. Let us help them surpass themselves throughout life, rather than just surpass others in an examination.

MOE will continue to partner and support our parents. We will provide parenting resources and tips throughout our platforms and work closely with Parent Support Groups.

Our partners, like the council members from COMmunity and PArents in Support of Schools (COMPASS), have also initiated ground-up efforts to support parents. Minister of State Sun Xueling will elaborate.

Our third partner will be our industry. As I have stressed earlier, industry needs to work closely with our institutes for continual learning, provide learning opportunities for our students to prepare them for the workforce and transform themselves to create good jobs for our graduates. Companies which partner our institutions well will also have the first call to the next generation of talent, and this is a significant competitive advantage.

Our fourth partner is our community. As they say, “it takes a village to raise a child.” In this spirit, we partner the community to support our students with higher needs, including through UPLIFT, ComLink and other efforts. But this is not all. All of us can contribute to this effort as well.

For example, as school alumni, we can give back to our alma mater, by mentoring younger students and giving them career advice. Let us all acknowledge the support we received from the community and the opportunities we received from society. Therefore, it is also our responsibility to give back where we can, so others may benefit as we have, so that every generation of Singaporeans can aspire to do better than the previous generation. Only so will we continue to preserve education as an uplifting force for all Singaporeans.

Chairman, may I have your permission for my MOE colleagues to elaborate on the various MOE policies please.

The Chairman: Please do. Second Minister Dr Mohamad Maliki Bin Osman.

The Second Minister for Education (Dr Mohamad Maliki Bin Osman): Mr Chairman, every child is important to us. MOE is committed to supporting our students to achieve their fullest potential, regardless of their background.

We agree with Mr Shawn Huang and Mr Leon Perera on the importance of supporting students in disadvantaged circumstances. These students may not have the best environment or opportunities to support their learning. Some may face challenges at home that could translate into poor attendance, motivation and self-esteem.

We are committed to ensuring that these students are not limited by their starting points in life. Across the system, we have dedicated programmes and support based on the students’ areas of need, including academic and socio-emotional support, financial assistance and provisions for special education needs. Our teachers pay extra attention to them, tirelessly reaching out to their parents, making home visits to understand their circumstances and providing support when the children are in school. It is very resource-intensive. But our teachers do so with passion and commitment. And the support goes beyond the school.

A key initiative we have undertaken is UPLIFT, or Uplifting Pupils in Life and Inspiring Families Taskforce. Introduced in 2018, UPLIFT has been actively helping students from disadvantaged backgrounds achieve success.

Let me share one example. Last year, I met Hafiza. Hafiza’s mother is the sole breadwinner of the family, which includes her and her infant stepbrother. Hafiza’s mother was busy with work and rarely around to guide Hafiza when she was growing up. Hafiza felt lost and unmotivated and ended up mixing with bad company. She ran away from home several times, missed school frequently and felt disengaged from her teachers and peers.

However, her teachers did not give up. They continued to reach out to her. Hafiza was touched by their concern and, gradually, opened up to them. Hafiza's teachers encouraged her to join after-school activities, like the Youth Community Outreach Patrol, where she built positive relationships with her peers and mentors who helped her gain confidence.

The UPLIFT Town-Level Coordinator and a volunteer family befriender also worked with the Family Service Centre and other agencies to provide the financial and emotional support the family needed and find ways to provide a more conducive home environment for Hafiza. For example, Hafiza’s mother made alternative care arrangements for Hafiza's infant brother, to allow Hafiza to focus on her studies for her graduating year.

Through these efforts, Hafiza achieved good results at the GCE "N" Level examination last year and progressed to a course of her choice in ITE.

When I met Hafiza, I could see the confidence in her eyes and was proud to see a young girl turn around and do better with self-determination and support from the community around her. Hafiza’s example illustrates three key components of support we will provide our students.

First, we will provide a supportive school environment responsive to the needs of each student. Providing customised support and attention to students with higher needs requires time and dedication. We will support our schools in doing so. We introduced UPLIFT Enhanced School Resourcing to provide schools with additional manpower, guidance and teaching resources to help students with higher needs more effectively. Forty-seven schools are currently supported under this initiative. We plan to expand this to 100 schools in total over the next few years to support around 13,000 students.

Second, we will keep students meaningfully engaged in programmes after school. Many of these students do not have conducive home environments and many of us know about it. Through a structured and nurturing after-school environment, we give them the opportunity to develop routines and skills to succeed. Since 2020, MOE has set up a Student Care Centre in every Primary school to provide a safe environment for students to rest, play, do their homework and engage in meaningful after-school activities.

We have made fees affordable. With subsidies under the ComCare Student Care Fee Assistance scheme, eligible students pay as little as $5 per month. We are also reaching out to help parents who have concerns over enrolling their child, like providing the necessary supporting documents. Last year, teachers in our Primary schools helped more than 700 students from disadvantaged families enrol in our Student Care Centres. We are seeing good progress made by these students. Many are more confident, they are more engaged in school and also more engaged in after-school activities. We will continue to help more disadvantaged families enrol their children into our Student Care Centres.

Our focus on after-school programmes continues into the Secondary school. About 120 Secondary schools provide after-school mentoring and motivational support under the GEAR-UP programme.

Third, we are building a strong network of community partners to complement efforts in schools and address challenges that the families of these students face. We started the UPLIFT Community pilot in 2020, creating a network of agencies, including Family Service Centres, Social Service Agencies and relevant Government agencies like ECDA and HDB. The pilot has supported more than 300 students in four towns so far. Most have seen improved attendance and their families have seen increased community support for them.

Encouraged by the success, we will expand this pilot. The UPLIFT Community Network has been rolled out to eight new towns in 2022. Eventually, when it is rolled out nationwide, 1,800 students and their families will be supported by the UPLIFT Community Network each year. We are grateful to our community partners who have been supporting our UPLIFT efforts and I urge more members of the community to step forward.

In addition to support for each student, we are also expanding pathways and opportunities across the educational system to cater to the different aspirations and needs of our students. I will now elaborate on our efforts in our applied education.

Mr Chairman, through the various initiatives I have highlighted, we will strengthen support to students with greater needs, especially those from challenging backgrounds. While we will provide equal access to opportunities to all our children, it is natural for each generation of parents who are better off to be able give their children a head-start in life, sometimes leading to unequal outcomes.

The link between socio-economic background and student outcomes that Mr Leon Perera has observed and is concerned with is not unique to Singapore and, in fact, is seen across countries. It is part of societal progress and development which result in social mobility for most, albeit at a different pace.

There will always be those who are slower due to challenging circumstances. What is important is that we give them the best support we can to develop the best that they can, enable them to move up the social and economic ladder, and do better than their parents.

As I have told the House earlier, we are encouraged by our students from less advantaged backgrounds. They do well, compared to their international counterparts. This gives us confidence and conviction to press on with our efforts.

Beyond targeted support and programmes like UPLIFT, we want to help all our students to be confident and resilient in the face of adversity. I thank Dr Wan Rizal and Mr Shawn Huang for highlighting the importance of supporting the mental well-being of our youths. We agree. As part of adolescent development, our youths face pressures on multiple fronts – from themselves, parents, peers, or from society.

This challenge is made more complex because technology has transformed the way our young people live today. Despite its benefits, technology and social media use can also distort their self-image and increase social pressure for many of our youths.

Improving youth mental well-being requires a coordinated effort. Minister Chan Chun Sing described earlier how we will give students more opportunities to develop holistically in school, and Minister of State Sun Xueling will share how we can equip parents to support their child’s well-being.

Let me focus on how we prepare students to be resilient as they cope with the pressures throughout their life and ensure that help is available if they cannot cope.

2.45 pm

First, we equip students with the social-emotional skills to be resilient. We want our students to be confident in themselves, to acknowledge their limitations and celebrate their strengths. They also need to be able to manage their emotions, seek help when needed and navigate online space safely.

These topics are taught under the refreshed Character and Citizenship Education, or CCE, curriculum. For example, one lesson teaches students how people respond to challenges quite differently. Students discover their signs of distress when they reach their limits of coping. They are encouraged to look out to others for support and realise that these experiences are normal. At different points in time in their lives, given the circumstances and experiences, they need help and it is normal for them to seek help.

Second, we are strengthening the supportive relationships around students, so no student feels that they face their challenges alone. This is especially important, as Dr Wan Rizal says, there are those who are suffering in silence. The more they are connected with friends, we hope the more ready they are to come out early, should they face some challenges.

Youths often seek out their peers for a listening ear. Today, every school has a peer support system that empowers students to look out for one another and build strong social support networks. Activities such as CCAs and camps also help students develop strong connections with their peers.

Students also look to their teachers for support. Teachers use CCE periods and form teacher periods to offer pastoral care. Schools have also set aside dedicated time and space at the start of each term for teachers to engage students on their well-being, be it managing relationship stress or other academic stresses.

Third, we provide students with access to the care that they need. Teachers are trained in basic counselling skills. They actively look out for signs of distress, offer support and refer students to counselling resources in school. We will continue to develop our teachers’ mental health literacy, so they understand and recognise symptoms related to common mental health issues early. Early identification is critical.

We are also increasing counselling resources to our schools. Beyond school counsellors deployed in every school, we are equipping teachers to help students with more challenging mental health issues and adjusting their teaching workload accordingly. We currently have 700 teacher counsellors and plan to deploy an additional 360 over the next few years.

Our efforts to strengthen the confidence and resilience of our students extend to our Institutes of Higher Learning, or IHLs. The Polytechnics and ITE offer a mental wellness curriculum to all students to provide a better understanding of mental health issues and where to seek help. They are also equipping more students with skills to support their peers as peer supporters. Each Polytechnic and ITE student is assigned a personal tutor, who they can turn to for guidance and support. We will strengthen professional development, so that these tutors can provide better care for their students and study ways to enhance their contact time with their students.

Another area we are studying is the coordination of care and support for students with more complex needs in the Polytechnics and ITE, as it often includes working with external stakeholders.

The Autonomous Universities have also introduced mental wellness programmes, including online modules and training workshops to equip students to help look after their mental and emotional well-being. They also have in-house counsellors available for our students.

Mr Chairman, let me now talk about enhancements to our Polytechnics and ITE.

We agree with Mr Sharael Taha, Mr Abdul Samad and Mr Shawn Huang on the need to prepare students for the jobs of tomorrow, especially given the pace of industry transformation. IHLs regularly review their course offerings and curriculum in collaboration with industry and economic agencies, to keep pace with the latest developments and ensure our students secure good jobs.

Our Polytechnics and ITE are a key part of our higher education landscape, catering to seven in 10 of each Primary school cohort. As we prepare our students for the future economy and their future, we also acknowledge the growing diversity in interests and aspirations amongst our young people. This was an area studied by the Review of Opportunities and Pathways in Applied Education launched last year. Let me give an update on our efforts in the review.

First, we agree with Dr Wan Rizal on the importance of providing flexible pathways for students to discover and pursue their interests. This gives students ownership of their learning and a more fulfilling educational journey that helps them find meaningful careers.

We have expanded admissions to allow students to enter the Polytechnics and ITE based on interests and aptitude, more than just their academic performance. Today, 20% of each Polytechnic intake enters through the aptitude-based admissions. The expanded range of Common Entry Programmes in the Polytechnics also allows students more room to explore their interests before specialising.

From Academic Year (AY) 2022, all Polytechnics will pilot the offering of flexible modular loads to students who need the time to build stronger foundations or pursue side interests such as entrepreneurship.

Second, we will continue to equip students with deeper industry ready skills. This was consistent feedback that we receive from both students, industries and other stakeholders. Indeed, rather than just learning in a classroom, we want our students to learn from active practitioners and be inspired by the range of opportunities out there. More than nine in 10 Polytechnic and ITE students today complete structured internships in the final year of their study. We will pilot the provision of earlier industry exposure opportunities for students in the Polytechnics from AY2022, beyond their final-year internships.

We agree with Dr Shahira Abdullah on the importance of securing good outcomes for our ITE graduates. This was why we introduced the enhanced three-year ITE curricular structure last year, to meet the aspirations of our ITE graduates to deepen their skills and upgrade beyond a Nitec qualification. Under the enhanced curricular structure, ITE students will be exposed to two linked industry attachments to deepen their industry exposure.

I am pleased to share that ITE recently welcomed their first cohort of about 2,000 students under their enhanced curricular structure. I am confident that these students will be well-supported and able to make full use of the opportunities in ITE to discover and pursue their interests. ITE will review the outcomes from this first phase of implementation and move more courses into the enhanced curricular structure after AY 2024.

As more ITE graduates obtain the Higher Nitec qualification, we will provide them options to deepen their skills and meet their aspirations. I would like to assure Dr Shahira Abdullah and Mr Abdul Samad that ITE continues to prepare its graduates well. Despite the pandemic, nine in 10 graduates from the ITE Class of 2020 found employment within six months of graduating [Please refer to "Committee of Supply – Head K (Ministry of Education)" debate for clarification to the number stated, Official Report, 7 March 2022, Vol 95, Issue No 55, Budget section.], with a median salary of $2,000 for those who were in full-time permanent employment, which is comparable to the year before. Results for the Class of 2021 will be ready later this year.

Besides our Polytechnic Diplomas, ITE’s Technical Diplomas, or TDs, and Work-Study Diplomas, or WSDips, provide an alternative form of learning with a greater emphasis on learning-by-doing. Some students actually learn better this way.

I met Sharon, for example, a graduate from ITE’s Higher Nitec in Cyber and Network Security. Upon graduation, Sharon pursued her interest in F&B initially. However, she discovered that she still had a strong passion for IT, and wanted to deepen her knowledge and skills. Sharon was informed about the Work-Study Diploma programme in Cyber Security and Forensics by her ITE lecturer and decided to take it up. This allowed her to embark on a career in a cybersecurity firm, in a sector that is increasingly important.

Preliminary outcomes of our WSDips are promising. Among the batch of graduates in 2021, around 80% stayed on with their host companies after graduation. These students saw an average increase in salary of about 20% upon completion of their diploma, with many taking on higher-level job roles.

Students can look forward to more opportunities as ITE works with industry partners and other educational institutions to expand their diploma programmes. We have made progress in our plans to provide 1,000 WSDip places per year in 2025. In 2022, ITE will offer 36 WSDip programmes, catering to over 500 students.

ITE also offers three Technical Diplomas, or TDs, in Automotive Engineering, Machine Technology and Culinary Arts, catering to around 100 students per intake. They plan to expand their TD offerings to other engineering, business and service domains. Employment outcomes of Technical Diploma, or TD, graduates have been very promising, with nine in 10 employed within six months of graduation, and their salaries comparable to graduates from the Polytechnics.

Third, beyond the technical skills, I am pleased to inform Mr Shawn Huang and Ms Mariam Jaafar that we will strengthen our focus on softer skills and competencies, for work and life.

With your permission, Mr Speaker, may I ask the Clerks to distribute a copy of the LifeSkills framework developed for our IHLs.

The Chairman: Yes, please. [A handout was distributed to hon Members.]

Dr Mohamad Maliki Bin Osman: Mr Chairman, this framework prioritises 10 skills, including critical thinking, collaboration, as well as mental resilience. These skills will prepare our students for the future workforce, where they are expected not only to excel in their domain, but also have confidence in working with their colleagues locally and globally. We will strengthen these skills through experiential opportunities outside the classroom, including internships, student activities and overseas exposure. The Polytechnics and ITE will enhance their curricula, so the incoming batch of students in AY 2022 will benefit from the enhanced baseline competencies across all 10 LifeSkills.

Building on this common framework, the Autonomous Universities will also embark on enhancements to their curricula to ensure graduates are equipped with baseline competencies in the same LifeSkills, but adapted to their student profile. Through these enhancements, we will continue to support the diverse needs and aspirations of our students, and prepare our graduates to learn for life and succeed in a wide range of fields. Mr Chairman, allow me to say a few words in Malay.

(In Malay): [Please refer to Vernacular Speech.] Chairman, the learning of Mother Tongue languages is an important part of our vision to help our students remain rooted and appreciate their culture.

During the Budget debates, Mr Faisal Manap shared his concerns about how our children would develop strong Malay language skills.

I would like to assure him that our Malay students are still performing well in their mother tongue subjects where the percentage of those who pass in national examinations has remained high over the years. This is something that we should be proud of although we acknowledge the challenges that they face due to exposure to the use of English language in today's world.

At the same time, we must continue our efforts to get students interested and maintain their performance in mother tongue learning.

We will continue to provide opportunities for our students to deepen their learning in mother tongue languages in schools, and increase their interest in mother tongue languages through activities organised by the Mother Tongue Language Learning and Promotion Committees.

At the policy level in MOE, we are pressing ahead with important reforms to our education system. We need to be prepared for a future where technological and business cycles are more compressed and the demand for skills is more dynamic, and also a future where our world is increasingly polarized and fragmented, even as we remain more interconnected and interdependent. A future where our social fabric continues to evolve as well, with more diverse aspirations and perspectives amongst our people.

Our vision for the education system has three key elements.

First, we want all Singaporeans to have confidence in our abilities and ourselves, so we can keep growing and maximise our full potential.

Second, we want all Singaporeans to continue to maintain our competitive advantage, through the ability to learn and re-learn, and our connectivity with the world.

Third, for us continue to appreciate and celebrate diversity, even as we work to forge a shared identity,

Achieving this vision requires us to rethink our approach to education. Our education is no longer something which ends in schools, but a continuous journey throughout our lives.

At a young age, we will build strong foundations for all students and spark their curiosity and desire for learning.

In schools, we will continue to free up time and space for students to discover their strengths and cultivate future-ready competencies. In higher education, we will continue to equip our students with the skills and competencies to succeed as they transit to the workforce. At the same time, our Institutes of Higher Learning will also grow into their roles as institutes for continual learning, working closely with industry to enhance the quality and accessibility of their upskilling and reskilling programmes for adult learners.

Chairman, we will continue to enhance our education system for the future of our children and our country. We need the support of all Singaporeans in this effort. Educators, parents, as well as community and industry partners all play a key role in developing a future that enable Singaporeans to have the confidence to chart their own path, and the resilience to respond to changes and disruptions.

(In English): As we embark on the enhancements to our education system, we will help our students to make the best of these changes. Together, we will nurture generations of confident and resilient students who are prepared to face the challenges and opportunities of the future economy.

The Chairman: Minister of State Gan Siow Huang.

The Minister of State for Education (Ms Gan Siow Huang): Mr Chairman, Minister Chan Chun Sing has emphasised that we need to adopt a lifetime view towards learning instead of relying only on the education that we go through in the first 20 years or so of our lives.

Our higher education institutions and adult training system must provide re-tooling opportunities for Singaporeans as they journey through different jobs over their career lifetimes. It is important that we do this well as it enables Singaporeans to remain employable and access good jobs.

This is why MOE has worked closely with our Statutory Board SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG) to push ahead with our efforts to strengthen our Continuing Education and Training (CET) ecosystem, as Ms Foo Mee Har, Mr Shawn Huang and Mr Darryl David have asked about.

Under SkillsFuture, we have been expanding the range of opportunities for Singaporeans to regularly reskill. This is especially important for mid-career workers who need to re-tool in the face of fast-changing technologies and new trends.

The need for reskilling was particularly evident during the pandemic, which brought great disruption to our industries and workforce. To address this, we introduced the Enhanced Training Support Package that helped enterprises make productive use of the downtime to train their workforce. To-date, companies have sent workers to take up almost 245,000 places in training courses, which better prepare them for emerging roles when the economy recovers.

As part of the SGUnited Jobs and Skills package, we launched the SGUnited Skills (SGUS) and SGUnited Mid-Career Pathways – Company Training (SGUP-CT) programmes to help mid-career individuals acquire new skills and capture new career opportunities as the economy recovers.

We worked with 18 CET Centres and 16 companies to provide industry-relevant training, coupled with employment facilitation, to help jobseekers secure placements. More than 22,000 Singaporeans enrolled in SGUS and SGUP-CT. The outcomes have been encouraging.

Two out of three of the initial batch of SGUS trainees found employment within six months after course completion. For SGUP-CT with companies, such as Google and IBM, more than half the trainees found jobs as well.

I met Mr Oscar Yong last year, one of our SGUS graduates who successfully switched to a new career in food manufacturing after working for more than 20 years in the electronics sector. Oscar is in his 50s. He was displaced from his previous job when his company relocated overseas in 2020. He signed up for the six-month SGUS Advanced Manufacturing Programme at the Singapore Institute of Management in the hopes of making a career switch. As part of the programme, Oscar did an industry attachment with Super Bean International. He performed well during the attachment and was offered a job of assistant manager of inventory and quality control when he graduated. I am heartened by Oscar's determination to reskill in pursuit of a new career and I hope that his story will inspire more Singaporeans to upskill.

As we look towards post-pandemic recovery, we will build on our experiences with SGUS and SGUP-CT and merge these two programmes into a new SkillsFuture Career Transition Programme (SCTP) from April 2022. The SCTP will be our steady-state train-and-place programme for mid-career individuals. It will be delivered by IHLs and selected private training providers and will incorporate key features of the SGUS and SGUP-CT which have worked well to strengthen training outcomes.

First, skills and training advisory services will be made available upfront to help trainees select courses that best suit their strengths and interests.

Second, all courses will have elements of industry involvement, such as industry projects or attachments with companies, to enable trainees to acquire industry-relevant skills.

Third, employment facilitation and career coaching will be part of the SCTP to support trainees in their job search.

SCTP will have a duration of between three and 12 months and we plan to launch them in sectors with good hiring opportunities, such as ICT and advanced manufacturing.

SCTP will be subsidised at SSG's prevailing rates, with enhanced funding of up to 90% for Singaporeans aged 40 and above. On top of this, to ensure that jobseekers with greater needs can access the SCTP, we will provide additional subsidies to cover up to 95% of course fees for eligible Singapore Citizens who are lower-income earners, long-term unemployed or persons with disabilities.

The SCTP is part of the continuum of initiatives by SSG and Workforce Singapore (WSG) to ramp up reskilling opportunities for Singaporeans who are looking for jobs or considering career switches. By working closely together to offer a suite of place-and-train, attach-and-train and train-and-place programmes and by jointly delivering outreach at career fairs and SGUnited Jobs and Skills Centres in the heartlands, SSG and WSG are aligned in their efforts to help Singaporeans access good jobs.

When we started to scale up the provision of career transition programmes at the CET Centres in 2020, we also provided additional SkillsFuture Credit (Mid-Career Support) to enable Singaporeans in their 40s and 50s to access such programmes. Along the way, we received feedback about individuals who may not intend to switch careers but would, nevertheless, like to utilise their credit to pursue meaningful upskilling to remain employable.

To this end, I am glad to share that we will expand the range of courses that the additional SkillsFuture Credit (Mid-Career Support) can be used for. Around 7,000 courses will be available from 1 June 2022, from around 300 courses today to give mid-career individuals more options to use their credit for upskilling and reskilling.

The list will remain focused on courses that deliver good employment outcomes. These include SkillsFuture Series courses in IHLs, industry-relevant courses offered by CET Centres, including private training providers, and courses which enable workers to progress in sectors with the Progressive Wage Model.

While we strengthen support for individual upskilling, I agree with Ms Foo Mee Har that enterprises also have an integral role to play in supporting their employees in their skills development journey. We also agree on the importance of workplace learning. This is why we have incorporated elements of workplace learning into many of our CET offerings.

For example, the SkillsFuture Work-Study Programmes allow trainees to upskill through a combination of structured on-the-job training and classroom learning. To increase such opportunities, we rely on employers to step up to deliver quality trailing at the workplace and we will continue to support them in their endeavour to do so.

We have expanded the reach of the National Centre of Excellence for Workplace Learning (NACE) to uplift the workplace learning capabilities of companies, especially SMEs. To-date, about 1,500 companies have benefited from the programmes offered by NACE.

We also encourage enterprises to play the role of SkillsFuture Queen Bees to mobilise other companies within their networks to engage in training and upskilling. This will raise the capabilities of the sector as a whole and enhance their competitive advantage.

SSG has been expanding partnerships with enterprises through the SkillsFuture Queen Bee initiative. Since its launch, more than 930 companies have participated in programmes curated by the SkillsFuture Queen Bees, of which 90% are SMEs.

Sheng Siong is an example of a company which took on the role of a SkillsFuture Queen Bee and is helping its suppliers build up workforce capabilities to accelerate the adoption of digital technologies.

With the support of Skills Managers and training providers, Sheng Siong has reached out to more than 60 suppliers to customise skills development interventions based on their business needs and skills gaps. This includes SkillsFuture for Digital Workplace courses to build foundational digital skills. Sheng Siong is also integrating SkillsFuture courses and resources into their supplier portal to encourage their wider network of suppliers to engage in continuous learning.

3.15 pm

Such examples show us the significance and impact of enterprises taking on a more proactive role in supporting skills development. This is why we have pressed on with our plans under the next bound of SkillsFuture. Strengthening the role of enterprises in driving workforce transformation will continue to be our key priority in the coming years.

As we ramp up our efforts to drive enterprise-led training, we can tap on unions and industry intermediaries as our key partners, too. With their extensive networks and understanding of companies’ needs on the ground, they can help us broaden outreach, aggregate skills demand and spread the benefits of our job-skills interventions to more companies and workers.

Our tripartite partners are supporting companies in their business and workforce transformation efforts, such as through NTUC's Company Training Committees (CTCs). Employers are supported in their firm-level action plans in areas like employment facilitation, job redesign and training. SSG can complement the CTC process by helping these companies build their skills development capabilities.

SSG’s partnership with PM Link and the Building Construction and Timber Industries Employees’ Union, which formed a CTC in 2019, is an illustration of how this can be done.

Over the past two years, SSG worked with the CTC to pilot a skills profiling digital solution that is based on SSG’s Skills Frameworks. PM Link, a project management company in the building and construction industry, used the Skills Frameworks to identify core competencies for their workforce. This enabled their employees to self-assess and benchmark their skills proficiencies against industry standards, identify relevant training to address skills gaps and participate in SSG-supported courses.

We also want to better tap on industry intermediaries, such as trade associations and chambers (TACs) and professional bodies, as they have deep industry networks and great agility in sensing the jobs-skills needs of employers.

SSG plans to partner TACs as "Skills Development Partners" to identify in-demand and emerging skills, facilitate timely dissemination of Jobs-and-Skills insights and put in place structures to accredit skills acquired at the workplace. This will help companies better plan for workforce upgrading and improve job mobility of individual workers.

For a start, SSG will work with IMDA to partner the Singapore Computer Society and SGTech in the ICT sector. SSG is also exploring similar partnerships with other TACs to expand outreach to more sectors. Mr Chairman, I would like to conclude in Mandarin please.

(In Mandarin): [Please refer to Vernacular Speech.] Building a strong skills ecosystem is essential to ensure that our workforce can access quality training opportunities throughout their lives. We endeavour to build a robust ecosystem that leverages the different strengths of the IHLs, private training providers, NTUC, TACs and industry.

Chairman, our plans to achieve this were set in motion seven years ago when we launched the SkillsFuture movement. We will continue to strive towards our goal of providing opportunities for all Singaporeans to develop to their fullest potential, and progress together as a society.

The Chairman: Minister of State Sun Xueling.

The Minister of State for Education (Ms Sun Xueling): Mr Chairman, as we work towards our vision of Confident Singaporeans, a Competitive Singapore and a Cohesive Society, we remain committed to supporting students with different needs, to enable them to develop confidence in their future and the skills and resilience to do well in life.

I thank Ms Denise Phua and Mr Shawn Huang for highlighting the importance of supporting students with Special Educational Needs (SEN). MOE has developed our landscape of support significantly. We will continue to enhance support for students with SEN throughout their educational journey.

I agree with Mr Gerald Giam that some children with SEN need more intensive interventions. I will say more about the early intervention provided for preschoolers at MSF’s COS.

In our mainstream schools, all students with SEN, with or without a diagnosis, can get support. As part of our whole-school approach, support is provided through inclusive classroom practices by all teachers, guided by Teachers Trained in Special Needs and Allied Educators in learning and behavioural support, or AEDs(LBS).

A small number of students may need individualised therapy delivered in clinical settings, or they may need a customised curriculum in a SPED school. For these students, schools work with MOE Educational Psychologists and parents to facilitate referrals.

MOE is constantly innovating to develop evidence-based interventions for the skills development of students with SEN. School-based Dyslexia Remediation, Circle of Friends and Facing Your Fears are examples. I would like to share more on another one, TRANSIT.

Entering Primary 1 can be a major transition point for our students. Some students may need additional support in developing social and behavioural skills to cope with this transition. Last year, I shared that MOE was implementing TRANSIT for P1 students with social and behavioural needs. With TRANSIT, students receive support from Allied Educators in learning and behaviour support and teachers at P1 to learn and apply self-management skills, to get ready to learn independently.

Since the introduction of TRANSIT, about 180 students have made encouraging progress in developing their self-management skills. I visited North Vista Primary recently and saw how students in TRANSIT had dedicated teaching resources to support them in their management of their socio-emotional needs, as well as in their abilities to interact with others. There are, currently, 66 schools implementing TRANSIT. Each can support up to 10 students in TRANSIT and we are preparing to support this number in every Primary school by 2026.

Mdm Rahayu Mahzam spoke about enhancing accessibility to SPED schools. We had announced in 2019 that we are working with our SSAs to set up three new Government-funded SPED schools that can support students with Autism Spectrum Disorder who can access the national curriculum, but need to learn in a SPED setting due to their moderate level of SEN.

One of these schools is St Andrew’s Mission School (SAMS), which began operating in January 2022 at Bukit Batok. With SAMS, there are currently 22 SPED schools distributed across Singapore to serve students with moderate-to-severe SEN. SAMS’ permanent site will be located next to Nan Hua High School and it will provide 500 Primary and 350 post-Primary level school places.

As part of our continued efforts to plan ahead and improve SPED school capacity, I am pleased to announce that MOE will be working with Cerebral Palsy Alliance Singapore to set up a second school in the West for students with multiple disabilities. These students have complex needs which can affect their learning and mobility and may also face medical challenges. Families can look forward to strong support for their child’s holistic development with SPED educators, Allied Professionals and parents working closely together.

We wholeheartedly agree with Ms Denise Phua that our vision to develop the full potential of our students with SEN should be a shared vision, requiring close partnerships with key stakeholders.

MOE works closely with schools, Early Intervention Centres, the Department of Child Development in hospitals, sister agencies and organisations, such as ECDA and SG Enable as well as, very importantly, our SSAs, to meet families’ needs at different stages of their journey.

We thank Ms Phua for her vision of the impact that SPED schools should have. We believe in the SPED schools and in our SSAs which run them. We are committed to resourcing them well, financially and through co-developing quality SPED curriculum and investing in SPED teaching.

The development of the SPED sector is situated within the larger Enabling Masterplan 2030. MOE is committed to co-creating solutions in the range of areas beyond SPED, across the lifespan of the children and families that we serve.

Both within and beyond special needs, MOE has been strengthening our partnerships with parents to equip our children so that they have the resourcefulness, resilience and confidence to meet challenges in the future.

Ms Phua and Ms Carrie Tan have brought across the critical role of parents, as what happens at home complements what happens in schools. We will support parents in the following ways.

First, we will strengthen our partnerships with parents through the COMmunity and Parents in Support of Schools (COMPASS). This is a different COMPASS from MOM's Complementarity Assessment framework.

MOE's COMPASS council has embarked on efforts to support parents as we continue to encourage broader definitions of success. For example, COMPASS has organised a series of Facebook Live sessions to create awareness of different pathways of excellence. The first session was held with industry leaders to discuss the qualities that make for a future-ready individual and the need to broaden definitions of success for our children. The next two sessions will share perspectives from parents and individuals.

Recognising the impact of social media and online behaviour on our children’s mental well-being, the COMPASS team is also working to encourage a culture of cyber kindness in parents and children through creating a set of cyber kindness best practices. They are partnering the Singapore Kindness Movement to provide resources to raise parents’ awareness and understanding of cyber wellness and kindness and how they can support their children in it.

COMPASS has also started capability-building sessions to equip Parent Support Groups (PSGs) to support their parent community to build good relationships with their children and enhance their overall mental well-being. This is carried out through a series of "Let Us Chat!" training workshops for PSG Leaders, which was recently completed across 14 schools.

Second, MOE is working closely with PSGs so that they can connect with and support fellow parent communities. I recently met with the 25 PSGs who are leading the charge in their own ways to support parents, through understanding the parents’ needs and being creative and resourceful in meeting those needs.

One example is Presbyterian High School’s PSG. By providing a listening ear and being a befriender, the PSG builds a strong circle of support for parents and provides different avenues for them to reach out and seek help, such as through level group chats and parent engagement sessions.

Another example is Victoria Junior College’s PSG. The PSG has been tapping on their student alumni to share their education and career journeys with their student and parent communities and provide tips on coping with stressors that students may face. Parents could hear from alumni about their aspirations and struggles, which helped them to better support their children.

Over the next two years, we will have more PSGs coming onboard these efforts.

MOE has launched a Mental Well-being Resource Guide and an online repository of resources for PSGs. Developed based on suggestions and feedback from PSGs, the Guide provides tips and resources that can inform PSGs’ efforts to support parents. The online repository is a live document and we will work with PSGs to enhance its content over time to cover other issues.

Lastly, we share useful resources and tips with parents via MOE’s social media platforms and the Parents Gateway, which has a new feature called "Parenting Resources", to guide them in supporting their children’s education journey. We are also working with partner agencies to incorporate more resources into the portal.

Our partnerships with parents, via COMPASS and PSGs, extend MOE’s efforts to build students’ confidence and resilience beyond the school environment.

We are also stepping up partnerships with other stakeholders in society. This is particularly pertinent in the area of mental well-being. Dr Wan Rizal asked how students with mental well-being concerns can be provided with stronger, coordinated care and support.

3.30 pm

Second Minister Dr Mohamad Maliki had spoken about our strengthened support for students’ mental well-being in schools through the refreshed Character and Citizenship Education curriculum. We recognise that the issues that affect student mental well-being are multi-faceted and stressors outside of school can have an impact. MOE is part of a whole-of-Government effort to support youth mental well-being through the Interagency Taskforce for Mental Health and Well-being, which is being led by Senior Minister of State for Health, Dr Janil Puthucheary.

As part of this task force, MOE and MSF are working together to provide greater support for families, children and youths to enhance mental well-being. Parenting is one key area we are looking into. I had earlier described MOE’s recent efforts, through the PSGs, to support fellow parents in taking care of their own children’s mental well-being. Through this task force, we will engage and empower a wider segment of parents with evidence-based, bite-sized parenting strategies and mental health and well-being knowledge, so that parents can build stronger relationships at home and help their child effectively meet life’s challenges. We will also explore effective ways to parent in the digital age.

Another area that we are concerned about is the potential impact of the digital world on students’ mental well-being. We are working with Government agencies, social media and technology companies and SSAs to create awareness of positive ways to use digital technology, harness technology platforms to promote a healthy online peer support culture and find practical solutions that mitigate online risks.

MOE is also part of whole-of-society efforts like the Youth Mental Well-being Network, which was set up in February 2020 by MSF, MOH and MOE to co-create ground-up solutions to improve youths’ mental well-being. Senior Minister of State Janil Puthucheary and Minister of State Alvin Tan will be announcing some updates on the Network later.

I have shared about our work with parents, Government agencies and the community to build an inter-connected network of care, support and opportunities for our students. Dr Mohamad Maliki had also spoken about our efforts, as part of UPLIFT, to build a strong network of community partners to support our disadvantaged students and their families. Minister Chan Chun Sing has shared about our partnerships with industry to provide more workplace learning opportunities for IHL students, and with Government agencies and companies to strengthen the employability and career prospects of our Polytechnic and ITE graduates in the future economy.

Together, these partnerships reflect our concerted, whole-of-society effort to transform the education system and achieve our vision of a confident, competitive and cohesive Singapore. Mr Chairman, Sir, in Chinese please.

(In Mandarin): [Please refer to Vernacular Speech.] Our students face a future that is being shaped by rapid technological changes, a world that is increasingly polarised and fragmented, and a society with more and more diverse perspectives, ideas and values.

To respond to the opportunities presented by these forces of change, we must be prepared to continuously learn and relearn, transcend fault lines in the world, and stay cohesive.

Singapore must therefore embrace three characteristics: to have the confidence in our abilities and ourselves, so we can keep growing and maximise our full potential; to stay competitive with the world and seize opportunities wherever they may be and, as a society, to stay cohesive.

We need to move beyond seeing education as just for schools, but as a continuous journey through life. We will build a strong foundation for our students from an early age, by sparking an innate curiosity and desire for lifelong learning. In schools, we will support our students to discover their strengths, and hone future-ready competencies, while gaining a sense of rootedness to Singapore.

Beyond school, we have an entire ecosystem of continual education and training, which will move beyond training some thirty to forty thousand students every year to ‘retooling’ some three to four hundred thousand workers a year. This life course approach requires a whole-of-society effort. Educators, parents, the community and industry partners are our essential partners in this endeavour.

Let us journey together to strengthen our education system and achieve our vision of a confident, competitive and cohesive Singapore.

The Chairman: Clarifications, please. Mr Patrick Tay.

Mr Patrick Tay Teck Guan: Sir, I just have two clarifications for the Minister. Firstly, on my suggestion to do an in-depth study, that is, to assess the mental health and wellness of our teachers and educators and whether MOE intends to embark on that. The second question is on the removal of mid-year exams for Primary and Secondary schools, which is upcoming. Does it also mean that in the mid-year, there will not be any sit-down tests as well as weighted assessments?

Mr Chan Chun Sing: Mr Chairman, to Mr Patrick Tay's first clarification, yes, indeed, we are closely monitoring the mental well-being of our educators and students, given the exceptional circumstances that we are in at this point in time. We do regular dipsticks. So, it is not just a one-time survey. We regularly monitor this and we have a certain baseline to see whether there are specific areas that we should be concerned with, not just in general for the whole teaching population, but also, very specifically, whether any particular schools or any particular group of educators might be facing a bit more stress than others. So, that is the assurance that we can give Mr Patrick Tay.

To Mr Patrick Tay's second question about doing away with the mid-year examinations, what we will have – and, increasingly, we are doing this in all our schools – is a series of continuous assessments. In fact, when I first went to MOE, I asked my colleagues: what is the difference between an exam and a test or assessment? I learnt this new word and I understand what my professionals are doing. A continuous assessment examines our students' ability to apply what they have learnt based on various modules. When it comes to the year-end exam, we have this term called the "synoptic assessment", which is that they are able to pull together different parts of what they have learnt to answer different questions. So, it takes a much broader perspective.

So, we will continue to have year-end exams where relevant and then we will couple that with continuous assessments module-by-module.

The Chairman: Mr Darryl David.

Mr Darryl David: Thank you, Chairman. Just two clarifications for the Minister. The first involves PSLE. Some time ago, I made a speech where I did not suggest that we should remove the PSLE. But rather, while we have PSLE, to also incorporate some coursework component such that every Primary 6 student ends up with an actual composite grade that is a combination of the PSLE examination and the coursework component that they have done, maybe a 70% examination, 30% coursework. So, I just wanted to ask the Minister if the Ministry is considering this and, if so, could he provide some thoughts on this.

Second clarification is about teachers. I mentioned earlier that I am really happy about the quality of our teachers. They have undergone some really good training. But I also talked about the possibility of encouraging or having more mid-career teachers coming in from other jobs, other industries, into the teaching profession to bring their experience with them. This can also be synced in quite nicely with continuing education and making sure that our people are trained to move into a different career. Could the Minister perhaps update or share if the Ministry has any plans to enhance this or to have this as a more structured programme for mid-career switchers to come into the teaching profession?

Mr Chan Chun Sing: Mr Chairman, with your permission, if I may take the second question first and then I will come back to the first question, which I will give a more elaborate reply.

Mr Chairman: Please proceed.

Mr Chan Chun Sing: On Mr Darryl David's suggestion on having more mid-career teachers, indeed, we have a healthy pipeline of teachers who join us mid-career. Every week, I visit at least one or two schools and every time when I visit the schools, I will always ask about their prior experience. And just from my random sampling, I can see that we have a very healthy pipeline of people who are mid-careerists and decided to join the teaching service.

As Mr Darryl David says, they do bring with them a wide spectrum of prior experiences that they can share with their fellow teachers and also the students. Having said that, I think we need it to be both ways, meaning that we need to recruit a fair share of mid-career teachers to enrich our portfolio of teaching experiences; at the same time, we must also enable our existing teachers in service to go out and build new connections and also to refresh themselves.

As I have always mentioned, I have never seen any of my teachers who were afraid of hard work, but instead, I think, when they work hard, they want to feel that they themselves are growing, that they also have the development opportunities so that they can feel refreshed, they can feel recharged and, if they feel refreshed and recharged, then I am very confident they will continue to spread this spirit of lifelong learning, the spirit of inquiry to their students.

So, we will continue to do that, both ways, to have more mid-career people coming into service and also to have more people in-service going out to have exposure. And this is particularly important for our Polytechnic and ITE lecturers.

Mr Chairman, on the first question of PSLE, I must share what is on my mind. I have given this very serious thought and I have listened very carefully to what Ms Denise Phua had said over the years. The fundamental issue is this: why are our exams stressful? Why? I have given a lot of thought about it. And I will perhaps sum it up in these four dimensions.

Why are our exams stressful? We then have to ask ourselves: why do we test? How do we test? When do we test? And what do we do with the test results? If we are not clear on our answers to these four questions, then exams will always be stressful, never mind if it is PSLE or year-end exams.

Let me start with "Why we test". If we see a test or an assessment as an opportunity for us to know ourselves better, to know our children better – where they stand, where they are strong at, where they are weak at – then this self-assessment should not be stressful. It is about surpassing ourselves rather than surpassing other people. But if we get this wrong, if the reason for testing is to compare with other people, on a relative scale, then, by definition, any test will be stressful.

If the test is to sort people out according to their different abilities, with serious consequences for their career pathways, then it will be stressful. So, the first point I want to make is this. If we truly, truly want our exams to be less stressful, we need to re-orientate our perspective on why we test.

And from MOE's perspective, we want all our assessments to be a feedback to our students and our parents on how their child is doing. It is how the individual child is doing vis-à-vis his previous self or her previous self, and not how he or she is doing vis-à-vis other students. We want to do away with this incessant comparison on a relative scale to truly appreciate what the child is strong in and what the child may be weak at and we need to help the child with.

The second is "How we test". I think many Members have spoken on this and we agree. Going forward, tests will be less and less based on rote memory. Instead, going forward, it will be about how our children can apply the concepts they have learnt to solve tomorrow's problems.

3.45 pm

Coming from NTUC and MTI, I can speak on behalf of the employers. All progressive employers are less and less interested in how our students are able to solve yesterday's problems with yesterday's solution or even today's problems with yesterday's solutions. All our progressive employers are looking for our students to be able to solve tomorrow's problems with tomorrow's solutions. Which means that more and more of our tests must be geared towards helping our students to prepare, to apply their knowledge in solving tomorrow's problems in context.

That does not mean that the tests will get easier. In fact, some people will think that tests by rote memory is easier. But that is not the skillset that we are looking for, as many Members have said. Today, with Google and the Internet, anyone can go onto the Internet to search for the information they require. The new skillset that is required is how we make sense of the plethora of information and combine them and create new solutions in context. So, that is how we test. Whether that is more or less stressful, it depends on our perspective again.

The third question is, when we test. If we test too early, as many Members have said, then it might be detrimental to some of the late bloomers, it might be detrimental to some of our younger children. But on the other hand, if we test too late, we will be unable to apply the interventions necessary to help our children to progress at a pace that is suitable to them.

So, somewhere in between testing too early and testing too late, we need to find the Goldilocks point that is just right. And we will continue to study this.

And I must qualify, given the diversity of our learners, it is very hard to say that there is just one point for everyone. But to the extent that we can, we will find that point – be it PSLE or otherwise – to cater to the bulk of our students. But the assurance that we want to give to everyone is this: that one point does not and will not define a person's future forever.

We have a process of what Senior Minister Tharman called "continuous meritocracy", where it is about continuous assessment, performance that determines one's achievement in life and not just on a single point and a single assessment – that should not be our attitude, otherwise, we instil fear in our students.

The final question is, what do we do with the test results? If our attitude and answer to the first question of why we test is – this is a self-assessment to find out the strengths and weaknesses of our students so that we can best apply the resources to help them fulfil their potential; then what we do with the test results, the definition of success for that, is that we apply the correct resources, provide the correct pathways to the students that require the necessary help. It is not about going to a particular school that is deemed as most popular or most successful.

If we take that attitude of what we do with the test results and that is about providing the correct pathways to give our children the best opportunity possible, then I think exams will be less stressful.

So, having said this, I am under no illusion that exams will have some stress. And I must also qualify that it is not our aim to remove all stress from our children. It is not possible and that should not be our aim. Our aim is to make sure that we stretch our students appropriately. Not too much, not too little. Having said that, we as parents, we as educators, we need to focus on these four sets of issues and hopefully find the correct answers for ourselves. Why we test, how we test, when we test and what do we do with the test results.

The Chairman: Ms Foo Mee Har.

Ms Foo Mee Har: Thank you, Speaker. I have two clarifications. One for Education Minister and the other for Minister of State Gan Siow Huang. The first question: Minister shared that we spend about quarter of a million per child in the formative school years and affirm that more will be invested in CET. And I spoke about CET currently, in this financial year, it is estimated to be less than 10% of MOE's budget. So, I would like to ask the Minister to elaborate exactly how funding for CET will be enhanced to allow workers to attain a more substantial qualification that is relevant to their work. So, more investment: how exactly do we see that being evolved over time?

The second question is for Minister of State Gan Siow Huang. Minister of State spoke a lot about career conversions programmes: place-and-train, train-and-place. And I do agree that these have been very useful for those whose career is in a transition. But I would like to ask about the framework that MOE is thinking for those who are still employed. So, they are not in transition, they are still employed, that is the majority of the people. These are the people who would like to pursue CET, to develop mastery as well as updating their skills and knowledge about constant upgrade. So, how can we ensure the CET programmes are duly certified and recognised by the employers, as well as ensure that CET credentials are recognised within the industry to allow mobility across employers in the same sector?

The Chairman: I would like to remind Members to keep their clarifications short, please.

Ms Gan Siow Huang: I would like to thank Ms Foo Mee Har for the two questions. I will attempt to take both of them.

First, on CET funding. Our spending on CET has increased steadily over the years and for this year's budget, what we think we will do substantially to strengthen the CET funding, is through the SkillsFuture Career Transition Programme (SCTP) that I mentioned earlier on. You would have noticed that SCTP is actually quite different from the past CET programmes that we had under SSG. You would notice that it is more holistic, it goes from the beginning to the end. The beginning portion we will put in a skills advisory, training advisory type of discussion with the trainee so that the trainee can pick suitable courses, not just what he or she likes to do, but what we think might help the person get a job and also meet the person's aspirations. I think that upfront is actually quite important.

The second thing about the SCTP is industry involvement, and that requires us to work with industries and some funding will be required for us to be able to scale this up.

And the third, the career coaching element and employment facilitation services, these are also very substantial investments that we are putting in. So, it is not a CET as in just training alone. But also translating it into getting jobs, good jobs for the individuals. We have learnt a lot from this SGUnited Jobs and Skills journey. We have learnt that individuals on their own, when they pick courses, the courses may not lead them to where they want to go. So, upstream intervention is needed. Also, early career coaching, helping them discover their career goals and providing the facilitation can make a big difference in helping a person land a better job. All in all, the investment in CET will go up substantially with this year's budget.

The second point about career conversion, indeed, there are many people, while they are already employed, are thinking of how to upskill, what to train themselves in, how to make themselves employable for a much longer term in their lifetime. I would say that, over time, we have also taken on board a lot of feedback from individuals, as well as from companies on what would be useful, what mode of training would be useful.

You would have noticed that now, there are a lot more bite-sized modules provided by our IHLs and our training providers. Some are online, some offline, all to tailor to the needs of busy working adults who want to upskill themselves but may not have the complete time flexibility to be able to do so consistently. It is important that we build in a wide range of types of courses, different modalities and have a lot of flexibility for individuals to be able to choose courses, not just in terms of content that suits their needs, but the form of delivery.

On the recognition of this type of training, we are undertaking a holistic review of our skills frameworks. And in fact, we are working closely with our colleagues in MTI and MOM to make sure that the training investment, the courses, that we provide to Singaporeans, while the courses will be recognised not just by the institutions and training providers, but actually more importantly by the industries, by the employees.

The Chairman: Mr Leon Perera.

Mr Leon Perera: Thank you, Mr Chairman. Just one point of clarification to the Minister Dr Maliki who addressed my cut and it is in relation to my cut where I asked if the Government can publish data by SES, background, for admissions into the different categories of schools: Government, Government-aided and Independent.

I think that having some transparency about that would be helpful to help us to monitor our progress to ensure that the more popular and well-resourced schools do not become closed communities. And that is the goal I think we all share. I would hope that the Government would consider just making that data public.

Dr Mohamad Maliki Bin Osman: Mr Speaker, I thank Mr Leon Perera for the supplementary question. I just want to start off by saying that we understand that what he is saying is we should have a good mix of students to encourage social mixing, students from different backgrounds in our schools. We must begin with the premise that no one education setting fits all students, although we have the same objectives in mind. We want to make sure that there is a good mix as students learn to grow in their adolescent period and understand the real world.

But I want to assure Mr Leon Perera that most schools have good representation from different socio-economic backgrounds – Government and Government-aided schools are largely representative of the national average. Our Independent schools, including Specialised Independent schools, there is some variation from the national average by virtue of the performance of the students at the PSLE – I mentioned during the Parliamentary Question by Mr Louis Ng earlier that there is a correlation between socio-economic background and performance at PSLE. But Independent schools cater to specific learner profiles that are different and with different aptitudes.

But really, our fundamental objective is not to achieve identical profiles for every school. Even our neighbourhood schools, they are identical in broad based curriculum, but they are unique in some specific aspects and because of that, almost all Secondary schools, in fact, all Secondary schools today, admit students in Secondary 1 through DSAs. Which means that they are able to niche themselves sufficiently. And what does DSA mean? DSA means that people with different unique talents go into the school. And we want to encourage that. We want to encourage that diversity in our school systems and in our school environment.

So, in the Independent schools, for example, we provide that opportunity for students from different backgrounds to interact. For Independent schools today, roughly, we have close to half of our students coming from public housing. So, there is a good spread of students from different socio-economic backgrounds in all our schools, including our Independent schools. Mr Leon Perera talked about how they are well-resourced. I want to assure Mr Leon Perera that all our schools are well-resourced.

4.00 pm

In fact, in my speech, I spoke about resourcing schools with higher needs. Because they have higher needs, we want to give the students the best that they could get and we respond to their needs accordingly.

But even if we do see situations where schools may not have the demographic profile that reflects the national profile, we also encourage them to use other platforms for integration, for students to interact and appreciate the Singapore society's profile. For example, once the students are in school, we facilitate interactions like Values in Action projects not just within the school but across schools, projects, co-curricular activities (CCAs), joint CCAs, joint camps, cohort level camps – many opportunities for the students to interact.

So, while the school provides certain experience which are relevant, with a right understanding of the objectives, it does not mean that our students are not interacting, that they are not mingling with students from different socio-economic backgrounds.

Just to give some examples. Integrated Programme (IP) schools are doing this too. They are also interacting with other students. For example, Anglo-Chinese School (Independent) works with Queensway Secondary School on their programme called the Play Inclusive Programme; Raffles Institution working with Crest Secondary School, collaborating with students in Scouts in the CCA, doing projects, community projects together; Raffles' Girls School with Edgefield Secondary School, with Guangyang Secondary School, collaborating on CCA programmes.

So, it does not mean that we need to just focus ourselves on the profile of students in those particular schools when, as I mentioned earlier, in almost all our schools, the profile is generally reflective of the socio-economic backgrounds across our students.

Mr Chairman, I just want to make one clarification to my speech earlier. I had said that in response to Mr Sharael Taha and Dr Shahira Abdullah nine in 10 of our ITE students are employed within the first six months. The correct figure is eight in 10. Maybe it was a mix-up, because nine in 10 of our technical diploma students get employed within six months. Just a clarification.

The Chairman: Assoc Prof Jamus Lim. Keep it short, please.

Assoc Prof Jamus Jerome Lim: Thank you, Chair. I have two questions for Minister Chan. The first builds on the question by Member Patrick Tay about abolishing the mid-year examination. Could I just clarify that the weight that was originally to be assigned to the mid-year will actually go to continuous assessment instead? Because if not, of course, removing the mid-year just means that the final exam becomes even higher stakes and it is more stressful.

Related to this, has the Ministry considered actually lowering the weight on this so-called synoptic assessment?

The second question is just to clarify what the Minister also said earlier on the later school start times. He mentioned that there were many other schools with later starts. How many schools or what proportion of schools have these later starts for at least the majority of the school days?

Mr Chan Chun Sing: Mr Chairman, the answer to Assoc Prof Jamus Lim's first question is that the weights in different schools differ slightly because of the different profiles of students. If you would like to know the specific weights for different schools, then I think we can provide him with the information.

But as I have mentioned, the school profiles are all different and we should not try to homogenise, have a one-size-fit-all measure or yardstick to judge all our students. We are moving towards a system that is much more customised to the respective needs of the students.

On the second point, in fact, a lot of our schools have different start times. Some of them have later start times on certain days of the week but it all depends on when they start, when they end. Some of our schools have kept certain afternoons totally free for their students and their teachers to recharge and do other things.

What I want to emphasise is this. If we recognise that the learning needs of our students are diverse, if we recognise that the background profiles of our students are diverse, we should strive towards a system that provides more diverse options for our schools, our teachers and our students. I think we must take care to not try to homogenise all the conditions when we in fact have agreed that we need greater diversity, which was what I mentioned in my speech. Actually, MOE has just one very simple rule: Thou shalt not start school before 7.30 am.

But I have gotten feedback from different schools on when they want to start and also when they want to end, which the day they want to start later and how much later.

In fact, this is a very good exercise for our students and teachers to come together and decide collectively what are their priorities and how do they prioritise the time.

I will be very careful as the Minister for Education to try to dictate for every school, given their different conditions, to have the same start or end time. I think I want my teachers, I want my students to have that agency to take charge of this and come to a reasonable understanding of where they want to be, given their different conditions.

The Chairman: I will squeeze in one more clarification. Dr Wan Rizal. Can you keep it short and the responses can be short as well? Thank you.

Dr Wan Rizal: Thank you, Mr Chairman. My question revolves around the mental well-being of the students and teachers. Maybe, I start with the teachers first.

Sir, thank you for laying out these plans that you have for the teachers but I think what is missing right now for the teachers is really a hard cap on their working hours because they tend to mark and it goes beyond their working hours. That is number one. Can the Ministry consider that as part of my clarification?

Number two is really on the students —

The Chairman: Just one clarification. Thank you.

Mr Chan Chun Sing: Mr Chair, in fact, the question that Dr Wan Rizal posed, I have asked my teachers in my weekly visits to the schools. Do they want a hard cap? Is it practical to have a hard cap? I am actually very heartened by the answers given to me by my teachers.

We all know our teachers work way beyond what we expect of them in taking care of our children. In fact, for some of the high needs students, our teachers have no cap whatsoever.

I visited Northlight School. A very challenging group of students. Sometimes, they get into trouble with their families. Sometimes, they get kicked out of their home in the middle of the night. But guess what? Many teachers in Northlight School gave their personal handphone number to their students to call them if they ever get into trouble outside school or if they ever got kicked out of their home. We have teachers that responded in the middle of the night, way past midnight, to pick up a student, to take care of them.

So, Mr Chairman, I think we all appreciate the point that we want to take care of our teachers and we want to do more. We all want in our different ways to try to alleviate the workload for our teachers by partnering them, by not overly burdening them with unrealistic expectations. We all can do something.

But I think it is also very unrealistic for us to put such a cap on our teachers. And even if I do, I do not think my teachers will stop just because they consciously calculate that, "My time is up and therefore, I will not respond to this high-needs student of mine".

I think that is something immeasurable. That is something that speaks to the quality of our education workforce, the kind of people that we have in the system that make our education system something that we can all be proud of, that makes our education system able to continue to function, notwithstanding COVID-19.

So, yes, MOE will continue to see how we can lighten the workload of our teachers by making sure that we review the curriculum, applying technologies and so forth. That is our promise to our teachers. We want to do that. But I think it is also not realistic for us to therefore say that every teacher shall not work more than x hours. Because their conditions are different, the types of students they are managing are different and I have seen all my teachers, including the very good teachers and counsellors in Northlight School, going way beyond their call of duty in order to take care of all our children.

The Chairman: Mr Patrick Tay, would you like to withdraw your amendment?

Mr Patrick Tay Teck Guan: Sir, I would like to thank our fellow Government Parliamentary Committee (GPC) Members as well as Members of this House who have filed cuts for MOE's COS so that we can hear their thoughts, ideas and suggestions.

Having had three children, one doing "A" levels this year, one doing Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE), another doing "O" levels next year, I thank Minister Chan Chun Sing, Minister Mohamad Maliki bin Osman and Minister of State Gan Siow Huang, Minister of State Sun Xueling and the entire MOE COS team for powering this entire Committee of Supply and bringing us fresh perspectives as well as some of the policies, announcements and programmes to make our education more caring, more inclusive and more future-ready.

At the same time, I also put on record our thanks to Director-General Wong Siew Hoong who is retiring from service at the end of this month. A big thank you to him as well. And the entire MOE team for giving us a good sharing of solving tomorrow's challenges with tomorrow's solutions.

On that final note, a big thank you to all our teachers and educators, past, present and incoming, for building this love for learning and embracing lifelong learning so that each and every one of us can stay future-ready, future-proof and be ready with new skills relevant to the new jobs and resilient for the future. [Applause.] With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

The sum of $13,410,729,900 for Head K ordered to stand part of the Main Estimates.

The sum of $393,400,000 for Head K ordered to stand part of the Development Estimates.

The Chairman: As Members would realise, normally as Speaker, I do not get to speak until the COS is over. But I would have to make an exception at this moment, especially after MOE’s presentation on lifelong learning and continuing training and education, this feels like one such moment. And you do not have to use your SkillsFuture credits for it.

I am sure Members are all very passionate about the respective topics, a lot of clarifications to ask. But I am sure the many Members would also understand how the process works. We update you and send you reminders.

Earlier, Members would realise there was a Point of Order called by Mr Leong Mun Wai, as he had some clarifications to be made. There was also still discussion last week about tea break time and guillotine time.

I understand and I was made aware that Mr Leong Mun Wai had also posted on Facebook. I would not repeat everything, but he made a comment about “I have a number of clarifications to make but the Speaker didn’t even give me the chance.” And also, he added, “completely ridiculous.”

I am sure Members understand how the process works. I am not here to speculate the intent and purpose of various Members’ postings. But I thought it was opportune for me to refresh everyone’s memories about how this ought to work and why.

Members are aware that all of you would submit cuts. And the formula as to how it works is this: 40% of the time comprises your cuts; 50% of the time would comprise the response time from the Ministries; and 10% of the time allocated for clarifications. All of you are aware of that.

I believe we also do have reminders sent out to all our you. I will just repeat that: “I wish to remind Members that the guillotine time for Head X is such and such a time. The guillotine times are published for Members for information. Pursuant to Standing Order 92, the debate on the respective Heads of Expenditure will end once the guillotine times are reached.

Members can file a Parliamentary Question (PQ) should they have further queries for the Ministry and should they be unable to raise their queries when the debate had ended."

Let me go to the source, just to repeat. Just bear with me. In Standing Order 92(7)(a), it states that “The Speaker shall fix the time on any allotted day at which the consideration of any head of expenditure shall, if not previously disposed of, be concluded. If the time so fixed is reached before the head concerned is disposed of, the Chairman shall forthwith put every question necessary to dispose of that head.”

Essentially, we have a time allocated for clarifications and there is a guillotine time. We work that out on a schedule basis and we will update on a daily basis. And you are made aware of that time, so that we can continue to proceed with other orders of business.

I think it is important for us to understand that, and especially for the public as to how this works. I know many of you would like to ask clarifications. We are not always able to accommodate. If any of you text me, grumbling about why, how come you have important question to ask and you cannot ask, I hope you bear with me for that.

It is important for us to understand this, because this is made clear to all of you and I am sure all of you understand that.

Just to also explain that when clarification time is reached and we have not reached guillotine time, then, it is the Chairman’s discretion as to whether we continue or not. In the earlier debate, for example, with MOM, we had finished the clarification time and we continued all the way until guillotine time. As for the debate, for example, with MOE, the guillotine time is 1630 hours, incorporating 20 minutes of tea time. I am actually eating into your tea time. As you will soon realise, your tea break will be a lot shorter than the 20 minutes allocated.

That is how we work out the various timings.

Another point to add, just so that you understand the thinking behind how I for example, call on various Members, I would like to give opportunities for various Members from various parties to be able to speak. Different Members have opportunities to speak at other times. So, we would like to give that airtime to different Members as well.

I keep track of it because I write everything down and I try to roughly allocate that across the space of the whole COS and Budget. And this includes, during normal PQ and supplementary question considerations as well.

So, let me just remind everyone in case we forgot who we called in the earlier MOM COS debate, just for your own understanding. I called Mr Desmond Choo, I called Mr Yip Hon Weng, Mr Patrick Tay, Mr Louis Chua, Mr Liang Eng Hwa, Mr Gerald Giam, Mr Abdul Samad, Assoc Prof Jamus Lim, Leader of the Opposition Pritam Singh and Mr Sharael Taha, who wrapped it up.

We have a number of Members who had asked to speak, such as Mr Edward Chia, Ms Janet Ang, Mr Louis Ng, Mr Leong Mun Wai, Mr Melvin Yong, Ms Yeo Wan Ling, Mr Leon Perera – and I apologise. We did not have time because we reached the guillotine time.

So, I thought as a matter of record, it would be useful to just state this. I would not pretend or do I wish to speculate as to why comments are made. But I thought this might be useful to remind all Members of how the process works.

Unfortunately, as I said, the guillotine time for MOE, as you would realise, is 1630 hours. And as a result of this clarification, I would now ask to take a break and take the seat at 4.30 pm. Order, order.

Sitting accordingly suspended

at 4.18 pm until 4.30 pm.

Sitting resumed at 4.30 pm.

[Mr Speaker in the Chair]