Committee of Supply – Head K (Ministry of Education)

Education Excellence for All

Ms Denise Phua Lay Peng (Jalan Besar): Madam, I beg to move, "That the total sum to be allocated to Head K of the Estimates be reduced by $100."

Madam, I believe that everyone, regardless of their age, income, connections or ability, deserves equal access to an excellent education. Singapore's education system is said by many to be one of the best in the world. Many countries look at us with envy. However, we are not perfect and we face our own giants.

I would like to use the language of Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat's "Budget speak" and share on three areas: (a) addressing near-term concerns in education; (b) future-proofing the education industry; and (c) educating for a caring and resilient society.

First, addressing near-term concerns. At a recent Meet-the-People session, a couple with three children asked me to appeal for more childcare subsidies for her younger ones. When I asked for more details, they shared that they are paying more than $500 for their eldest, a Secondary 1 student, for tuition. The tuition fee is more than 10% of their household income. Tuition is, indeed, too prevalent to ignore. It is still thriving as a shadow education industry.

And as though the $1-billion academic tuition industry needs another boost, another form of tuition for Direct School Admissions (DSA) has arisen. It was reported that there are tutors who can help pupils build DSA portfolios at the rate of up to $300 per hour.

The Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) cut-off points for entry into secondary schools of one's choice are a key performance indicator (KPI) for not only many students, but also their parents and school educators.

Some educators feel that the education rat race has begun even before one enters Primary 1. Others fear that meritocracy is at risk of losing its place as a social leveller as those in the higher-income groups self-perpetuate themselves. Woe be the day when a child's postal code determines his destiny.

Then, for those who learn differently, whether in special or mainstream schools, including the Institutes of Higher Learning (IHLs), quality of support is still inconsistent. Education excellence for this group of learners is still an aspiration.

But all is not lost. As a member of the Government Parliamentary Committee (GPC) for Education for many years, I know that the Ministry has been diligently confronting these mountains. They and many other Singaporeans know we must level the playing field so that every child has the opportunity to excel.

In January this year, I had spoken at length about the unhealthy trends of our preoccupation with academic success; "parentocracy" and the physical segregation of students based on their learning abilities.

I had also given several suggestions, including removing the high-stakes PSLE at the age of 12, but retaining the rigour of academic learning; and a review of the current model of sorting students into geographically different physical schools which may not reflect the microcosm of society.

It leaves me to seek an update from the Minister on how he intends to:

One, further level the playing field for students of lower socio-economic backgrounds.

Two, use technology to empower students, families and educators to access the best education practices and resources in content, pedagogy and assessment.

Three, review the PSLE, the Gifted Education Programme (GEP) and DSA systems and reduce the obsession with academic scores and perceived "elite" schools.

And four, provide better support to those with special needs in special schools and mainstream schools, including IHLs.

Next, I want to touch upon future-proofing the education industry. Madam, we have heard how the world has changed and how technology and disintermediation – the removal of the middleman – disrupt the jobs of not manufacturing but also service industries, such as in journalism, travel, real estate and retail.

Our education sector is not immune to the fast-changing world that Budget 2016 has warned us about. The need to fend off disruptive advances, move from value-adding to value-creation, getting into the Internet of Things are, I believe, as real in the not-for-profit education landscape as it is in the business sector.

How do we future-proof our education system? Surely, there is a similar need for the Ministry of Education (MOE), like the rest of Singapore's key industries, to develop an industry future-proof transformation plan to look into deepening innovation capabilities and to help our people adjust and seize new opportunities.

SkillsFuture was the first salvo to future-proof our nation. It represents a strategic and new look at how Singapore looks at schooling and learning – instead of a paper chase – and skills mastery, lifelong and self-driven learning.

Minister Heng has announced a SkillsFuture or a future-ready toolkit that will be available from Primary 5. What about for our educators and parents? How about learners who continue to learn long after their traditional school exit at the age of 18 or 21? How can the current schools, including special schools and IHLs, be relevant to all of them?

Besides doing things to our students, we should work with partners to develop an Education Sectoral Manpower Plan. Resources ought to be invested heavily in developing the future-ready mindsets and skillsets of educators and parents. Lead by example. That is for SkillsFuture.

Next, to future-proof our education sector, I feel there is the need to speed up the application of technology to bring excellence to many more. Besides its plan to launch an online learning space for its students, can MOE build an open-source platform to allow participants to develop, evaluate and contribute education ware?

Madam, I also believe that MOE needs to assemble a team to study the potential disruptions in the education model we are used to in this country.

Some of us have heard of The Independent Project where United States (US) high school students are allowed to start a mini school for themselves. But that is at the extreme.

Across the world, there are dream-school projects which are collaborations with researchers and innovative businesses, born out of a need for more effective and future-ready models for content, delivery and assessment.

MOE should give space to develop dream-school projects that can address current hot buttons and further future-proof ourselves.

Lastly, on education for a caring and resilient society. I commend MOE’s recent plans to have all students clean up their school on a daily basis. I also support its plan to build resilience in our youths through its National Outdoor Adventure Education Masterplan.

The goal of an excellent education must be the character of a person and must be based on a few key principles.

One, that values are caught, not taught. Students gather their morals and values from their experiences.

Two, that seeing is believing; and the modelling of the significant adults in a student's life is worth many lectures on good character. As Ralph Waldo Emerson puts it, "Your actions speak so loudly I cannot hear what you are saying".

Three, that serving others must be the rent one pays for being here on earth, and to whom much is given, much is also expected.

There are so many ways by which the education sector can contribute to the making of a caring and resilient society. Ad hoc or piecemeal efforts bear little impact either for the giver or the receiver. One of the ways is to adopt a targeted approach to adopt causes on a committed basis and serve those who need a leg up.

One, develop academic and non-academic support schemes so that those who are stronger in some areas can buddy and coach those who are less so.

Two, encourage graduates to make use of their school holidays or gap years to serve students at risk, localising the "Teach for America" model that is quite well-known to suit our specific local needs.

Third, go for bolder and more audacious initiatives, such as co-locating and co-running special schools within mainstream school compounds.

Four, help address key painpoints in society that are often talked about and not easily resolved, such as the homeless, the karang guni peddlers, families with members with rare diseases or other severe disabilities.

In conclusion, Madam, MOE is one of our largest Government agencies. As the captain of the education industry, it has to not only address its near-term challenges but also envision and transform itself to be a key game changer so that Singapore will be future-proof and will be here for many more 50 years to come.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the author of the classic "The Little Prince", was believed to have said, "If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them first to yearn for the endless immensity of the sea." I look forward to both yearning for the sea and building a ship with the Ministry and my fellow Singaporeans. [Applause.]

The Chairman: Dr Intan, you have two cuts. Please take them together.

Holistic Education, Co-curricular Activities (CCAs) and Creative Arts

Dr Intan Azura Mokhtar (Ang Mo Kio): Madam, over the years, our education system has evolved from survival to efficiency, to being ability-driven in terms of strategies, approaches and expected outcomes. We are now promulgating multiple pathways to diverse peaks of excellence in our education system. In our bid to make our education system more diverse and holistic, we have to include more co-curricular activities (CCAs), outdoor learning, the creative arts and community involvement in our school curriculum.

I laud the move to recognise students' involvement in clubs, societies, sports, music and drama as part of the formal school curriculum, hence, placing such involvement as CCAs, rather than what was previously known as extra-curricular activities. This is good because values, such as resilience, sportsmanship, having the spirit of teamwork and developing one's leadership skills, can be honed.

However, currently, students' involvement in CCAs depends a lot on their ability in a particular interest group. For instance, before a student is able to join the school's netball or football team, the student has to undergo trials to see if they are good enough to be part of the school team.

The purpose of CCAs is to allow more of our students to have a more balanced and holistic education in schools. But having trials to see how good they are before they are allowed to be part of a particular sport or ensemble unnecessarily restricts participation and does not allow late bloomers the space to blossom. I would propose that our schools expand their CCA intakes to take in different tiers of student abilities. For example, a school can have a Tier 1 netball team to compete in national schools' competitions and a Tier 2 netball team to train students in the sport or even have friendly matches with other schools' Tier 2 teams.

In addition, the integration of outdoor learning and creative arts in our main school curriculum will strengthen learning and personal development of our students in schools. Schools in countries, such as Finland, have incorporated outdoor learning in their curriculum where students learn map reading and trekking and put the knowledge learnt in Mathematics, Geography and Physics into practice; while schools in Australia have incorporated creative arts in their curriculum where students learn to appreciate music, visual arts, drama and dance and apply the knowledge learnt in English, Literature and Physical Education. I would even propose that appreciation of music, dance and culture of the different ethnicities in Singapore be included in our creative arts curriculum.

Being involved in the community through projects and outreach programmes helps foster values, such as empathy, caring for others and magnanimity. I hope the Ministry will continue to build on our Values in Action programme and grant sufficient space for our students to design and implement their own community outreach projects so that they are able to learn and internalise these values in a more authentic manner.

Inclusivity

On inclusivity, the new PSLE scoring system that was first announced by the Prime Minister at the National Day Rally in 2013 is a strong signal to parents, teachers and students of our move away from chasing the last point for the PSLE aggregate score. This chase, in turn, affects admission to secondary schools, particularly those that are more popular than others and where the school cut-off points can be rather high.

As a result of such keen competition to gain admission to these popular schools, many students depend on the DSA to leverage their other talents, such as in sports, music, dance or specific academic subjects. There are students who may not have met these popular schools' cut-off points for PSLE but have talents in other areas. There have been some concerns that popular schools which admit students through DSA in non-academic areas may end up having these students under-performing or doing poorly in national examinations, hence, affecting the schools' overall performance.

I can understand that some popular schools are proud of their traditions and would like to retain a certain standard of excellence among their students. However, excellence cannot just mean achievement in academics. Excellence must be holistic and include those in sports, the arts, music and community work and volunteerism. I would like to urge the Ministry to continue to allow popular schools to admit students who have talents that are non-academic in nature. The diversity in student population created would then be more representative of the larger community where different abilities exist and where the environment is not so exclusive.

Similarly, I would also like to urge the Ministry to help the less popular schools attract a more diverse student population, such as those who have talents in both the non-academic and academic arenas, by allowing these schools greater flexibility and autonomy to admit more students through DSA.

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As schools strive to create greater diversity among students and provide multiple pathways of excellence for them to pursue their interests and abilities in, there must also be efforts to ensure that our schools are a lot more inclusive. I have two suggestions.

One, as the PSLE grading system will be tweaked, I call on the Ministry, once again, to consider abolishing the academic streams. Sorting our students according to academic streams has served its purpose during our efficiency-driven education era. But now, as we try to move away from putting too much emphasis on scores and instead allow students to learn different subjects at different levels of difficulty, according to their abilities, let us go one step further and remove these self-limiting but no longer necessary labelling which we call Gifted, Special, Express, Normal (Academic) or Normal (Technical) streams.

Let us recognise that students develop differently and at different rates. We have already allowed subject-based banding and allowed students in the current Normal (Academic) stream to take some Express stream subjects because they are able, for instance. Let us now be bold enough to remove the labels entirely and yet continue allowing our students to learn different subjects at different levels of difficulty according to their abilities and progress.

Second, in our bid to make our schools more inclusive, I would urge the Ministry to include more students with special needs in our mainstream schools, as long as they are able to cope with the rigour and expectations of the curriculum. There are Allied Educators for Learning and Behavioural Support or AED(LBS) who can help students with special needs in the classroom. Although we have AED(LBS) in all our primary schools, it is not quite so for our secondary schools. I would like to see all of our mainstream schools having AED(LBS) so that students with special needs can enrol in any of our mainstream schools.

To mitigate the challenge of not being able to employ enough AED(LBS), I hope the Ministry would consider my earlier suggestion to train suitable parent volunteers to take on this role. I envision our schools to be a lot more inclusive, being a microcosm of our society, where various abilities and disabilities exist together, and where our students learn to work together and help one another with compassion and magnanimity.

Review of PSLE

Mr Seah Kian Peng (Marine Parade): The Ministry has taken steps to reduce competition in PSLE scores. We stopped announcing the top PSLE scorers since 2012 and stopped revealing the highest and lowest scores in a cohort.

Despite these changes, the PSLE remains a high-stakes examination for 12-year-olds. Without T-scores, children and parents will still be in a race to achieve the "best" grade bands to secure a place in the "good" schools. Even the DSA Exercise has just been an entry route for students who have had the resources or opportunity to be developed in certain areas of sports or arts. At the end of the day, children are still pushed to compete against others, if not in academics, then in sports or arts.

Competition is a fact of life, and we do our children a disservice if we do not prepare them for it. But we also need them to appreciate that human beings cannot be measured like the weight of fish or the height of trees. And our children need to develop in a less stressful and competitive way.

MOE is developing diverse programmes in schools to meet the needs of different children. This is an encouraging development, but how will this be aligned with the review of the PSLE system? Will school admissions still be based on how well the children perform academically or in that area of specialisation, or more based on whether the child's interest and aptitude match the school's programme? How can we improve our PSLE system of grading and make it less stressful, broader and free up more time and space for them to pursue other interests outside of academics?

Finally, we recently introduced SkillsFuture initiatives, such as the Earn and Learn programme for polytechnic and the Institute of Technical Education (ITE) graduates, recognising that students can take a longer or different pathway to their respective careers. This is a positive step. Can the Minister tell us how we can carry this through to primary school so that it is not necessary to just "cram" at the PSLE level and make it a must to get into that one good school?

Ensuring Every School is a Good School

Mr Png Eng Huat (Hougang): Mdm Chair, the seven neighbourhood schools that received no Secondary 1 posting from this year were attributed to the following cohort size. Indeed, the 2015 cohort of 38,600 Secondary 1 students is about 10% lower than the previous year. However, if MOE were to divide the 2015 cohort size by the number of secondary schools, it can easily fill all schools, including these seven schools, with at least five to six classes of 40 students each. Thus, the reality is that all schools are created not equal, as popular schools will continue to attract more students at the expense of neighbourhood schools. These call into question the mantra that every school is a good school.

The mad rush to become a parent volunteer, join the Residents’ Committee or even relocate just to secure a better chance in the balloting exercise for admission into popular schools for their children has become a stressful ritual for parents year after year. So, in the minds of parents, every school is definitely not the same. But what do teachers and principals think? I am sure when teachers and principals come together, the issue of funding for their schools will surface somewhere down their conversation. It is my belief that MOE must walk the talk that every school is, indeed a good school by addressing the funding issues first.

In a reply to my Parliamentary Question on funding for schools, the Minister said it is not meaningful to compare funding per school but rather we should look at the per capita funding per student. Madam, I believe comparing funding for schools is meaningful because we are talking about every school is a good school at the school level. So, while we know that every student can be a good student because they are given the same per capita funding, I am not sure if every school can be a good school in the context of funding at the school level.

Popular schools with higher enrolment numbers, by default, will have more budget to work with. This, in my opinion, creates an unlevel playing field for less popular schools. I shall confine my speech to primary education to illustrate this point.

Let us compare Rosyth Primary School with an enrolment of 2,000 students with Bendemeer Primary School with an enrolment of 1,200 students. Based on per capita funding per primary school, Rosyth Primary School is effectively receiving $7.8 million more than Bendemeer Primary School every year. This disparity is significant and needs to be addressed because smaller schools will always face a budget constraint by default. This disparity will perpetuate year after year as popular schools with bigger budgets will be able to do more for their students, and at a lower cost due to economies of scale.

And when schools churn out even more top students, it will be a hard sell to tell parents that every school is a good school because neighbourhood schools will be shrinking in size and disappearing over time.

Madam, we are living in a social media world. We do not need the mainstream media to publicise anything anymore. The popular schools will get more popular through the grapevine. Does the Minister not agree that it makes a world of difference for principals and teachers of smaller neighbourhood schools to have a comparable amount of funding as those popular schools to run their programmes each year?

For a less popular school with a smaller cohort, the extra funding will come in handy to compensate for the lower economies of scale in the procurement of products and services for their students. These schools will also be able to do more in sports and enrichment programmes which, I strongly believe, are important activities for small neighbourhood schools to build character and instil a sense of belonging and pride in their students. I urge the Ministry to release such funding data so that all stakeholders can have a meaningful discussion over this mantra that every school is a good school.

Next, I wish to suggest a fundamental change to the Secondary 1 posting in the context of every school is a good school. I propose that graduating students finishing in the top tier of their primary school based on PSLE results, to be given direct admission to a secondary school of their choice. Currently, primary schools are already recognising their top PSLE students. So, the chances of top students from neighbourhood primary schools going to popular schools like Dunman High, Hwa Chong or Raffles Institution are no lesser than their peers from popular primary schools now and still based on merit at the school level.

This will ensure a good mix and spread of students from all spectrum of primary school going into secondary school. This will also prevent elitism from entrenching itself in the feeding primary school and the popular secondary school. This new posting exercise will make every primary school a good school, as the top graduating student in each school will have a direct entry to a school of their choice. For parents who want their children to attend a popular secondary school, every primary school is a good school to start the journey now.

Equitable Funding for Schools

Mr Dennis Tan Lip Fong (Non-Constituency Member): Madam, in financial year (FY)2013, the per capita funding per student for secondary schools was $11,400 and, for independent schools, it was $14,100. That is a 24% disparity. In FY2015, the disparity decreased to about 10%. This is a step in the right direction. But the Ministry needs to commit to 100% equitable funding for all schools.

Equitable funding means levelling the playing field for neighbourhood schools so that they will have additional funds to invest in varied arts, sports and enrichment programmes. This will help develop students more holistically and improve the overall quality of schools. Currently, neighbourhood schools have less disposable funds than independent schools, putting them at a distinct disadvantage.

The Ministry has a long-standing position that schools are resourced on a needs-basis, depending on programmes offered and the enrolment of the school. I have two concerns on this.

One, if a neighbourhood school has lesser funding to begin with, how can the school even start to invest in, say, a niche elective in the first place, to justify for additional funding?

Two, neighbourhood schools do not enjoy the privileges of independent schools like higher school fees and a wealthy alumni. How does the Ministry take this into account in schools' funding criteria to ensure fairness?

As we see more schools merge due to lower enrolment, it is a good opportunity for the Ministry to redistribute funding across neighbourhood schools to equalise this disparity.

Yes, resources may only be a part of the solution, but it is, nonetheless a basic and critical component. I believe that equitable funding is a realistic and worthwhile objective that the Ministry should seriously consider. Improvements have been made in recent years. It is possible.

Assistance Schemes, Awards and Funds

Mr Muhamad Faisal Bin Abdul Manap (Aljunied): Madam, first allow me to declare that I have a child who is receiving education in a private institution.

Madam, the Ministry has put in place good and comprehensive financial schemes and funds to assist Singaporean students from needy and lower-income families who are receiving their education at Government-funded institutions. These schemes and the relevant awards are significant in motivating students who display excellence and commitment during the course of their educational endeavours.

Members of this House would be familiar with some of these schemes. These include the Financial Assistance Scheme, EduSave scheme and the Opportunity Fund scheme. In their respective ways, these schemes go a long way in helping and supporting needy students in their educational, enrichment and personal pursuits.

The Ministry took a big step forward by extending EduSave contributions to all Singaporean students. Upon deliberation and discussion, the national examination fee waiver was also extended to all Singaporean students in 2015.

It is in this spirit of lending a helping hand to our children and fostering their respective development, where every child is an invaluable asset to the future of this country, that we should further assess the feasibility of extending all MOE assistance schemes, awards and funds to all eligible Singaporean students, including those who are receiving their education in private institutions.

As a Ministry that is tasked to nurture the holistic development of every precious Singaporean son and daughter, the extension of its schemes to all eligible Singaporean students, regardless of their choice of school, is a bold act of inclusivity that will motivate our children to aim for the horizon and pursue the rainbow before them. Let us partner our children and lead them down the many unknowns in their educational life with anticipation, hope and joy.

Minimise Homework, Maximise Impact

Ms Kuik Shiao-Yin (Nominated Member): We communicate our intentions in three ways: through what we say, what we do and what we reward. And each form of communication is more important than the last, and people always listen to rewards the most. No matter what you say, they will take what you reward as the truth of what you really want. So, if we care about priming our kids in the habits needed for innovation and collaboration later, we have to build in the reward of those behaviours into the school system now.

Change across the board is hard. So, I was wondering if MOE could consider collaborating with researchers and just one or two progressive primary schools to prototype a solution trying out these two interventions.

First, redesign report cards. They tell us plenty about our priorities. MOE has eight stated outcomes of what a kid should have achieved by Primary 6, including great things like: (a) they know their strengths; (b) they have a lively curiosity about things; and (c) they cooperate, share and care for others. But because every primary school still dedicates the biggest real estate on report cards to subject grades, every stakeholder gets the message that these outcomes do not really matter.

If these behaviours are not tracked or rewarded on a report card, it is not going to happen systematically; just accidentally. You can hear few parents freaking out about their child not "knowing their strengths" or stressing about Ah-Boy's lack of "curiosity", even though that is actually more indicative of future success. So, I suggest we give significant space on report cards to non-academic indicators closely linked to our strategic outcomes of innovation and collaboration.

Second, develop a homework policy. Progressive American schools have done this. Principals can collaborate with researchers and staff to develop a policy that grounds everyone in a common agreement on what productive, purposeful homework looks. Homework also comes with clearly marked learning objectives to prevent miscommunication. A succinct and specific set of standards less than a page long makes clear to all stakeholders from the start what to expect from the school in terms of ideology, quantity and quality of assignments.

For instance, a school that believes in family-friendly homework policy could say something upfront like "In here, our Primary 1s get three traditional academic assignments and two unconventional homework assignments that have academic and non-academic purposes".

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Differentiated homework policies can help schools build up distinctive cultures appealing to distinctive types of parents. So, I hope MOE can consider piloting a Mindful School strategy.

Cultivating Non-academic Attributes

Mr Leon Perera (Non-Constituency Member): Mdm Chairperson, good KPIs make for good outcomes. The MOE KPIs in the 2016 Budget Book are still heavily skewed towards academic credentials, stressing the number of passes and so on. These are important but in the 21st century, we will increasingly need qualities like leadership, initiative, confidence, creativity, communication skills and altruism.

While we have stopped publishing PSLE top scorers and the like, I fear credentialism is still deeply entrenched among parents, teachers and students, and we need to break this self-reinforcing loop. For example, in Singapore, parent-teacher meetings (PTMs) often take the form of the teacher explaining the gaps in the child's performance without the child being present, with the view to the parent helping to remedy those gaps at home. Many of us are familiar with this. I do not blame our teachers at all for this. They are doing their jobs as defined by the system, and usually they are motivated by genuine care for their children.

But contrast this with the PTM held at one western international school here that I learned about. The PTM was run by the children themselves. It was the child who led the PTM by explaining to their own parents in front of the teacher what they have done that term, what they will try to do next term and so on, with the teacher's facilitation. Would this not be leadership? Would this not be confidence?

I suggest that MOE give some thought to designing and measuring KPIs for such softer but critical qualities. There are a number of international measures of such qualities that could be surveyed each year without recourse to mass standardised testing and which warrant further study by MOE.

One such KPI that I would like to suggest is the number of students' self-initiated projects which enjoy positive peer and teacher reviews and can sustain a critical mass of student participation, encouraging our students to initiate their own projects in an entrepreneurial way and breed these kinds of qualities.

Initiating one's project, like setting up a new club, a new sports activity, a charitable project, an informal business activity and so on, both reflects and nurtures just the kind of qualities that we need in the 21st century.

CCAs in Schools

Mr Chen Show Mao (Aljunied): Madam, schools widely have encouraged the active participation in various CCAs in order to promote a more well-rounded and holistic education. We believe CCAs inculcate values, such as perseverance, and help students develop transferable skills in organising, planning, self-discipline and other areas. CCAs also foster integration and deepen the students' sense of belonging and responsibility towards the community.

However, CCAs may have increasingly become more exclusive in two respects: the cost of taking part in them and the push for deliverable results. There are stories of students turned away from certain CCAs because the students have no reasonable prospects of winning trophies for lack of prior training or natural ability. In fact, it appears that the further students progress in their education, the more difficult they find it to participate in CCAs and sports or in the performing arts. This is even more so if the CCA is known to be a niche CCA that the school is supposedly good at, where, presumably, you have more teachers and fellow students with much to share.

There are also stories of schools that have closed down popular CCAs because they have been unable to deliver quantifiable results. I would like to call on the Ministry to look into how CCA participation may be broadened and made less exclusive. CCA participation, I feel, should importantly be based on students' keen interest to take part, in addition to their demonstrated competency. Allowing students to follow their interest will keep them motivated to remain in the CCAs for the long term and reap the rich educational benefits that CCAs in schools have to offer.

The Chairman: Dr Lim Wee Kiak; not here. Assoc Prof Daniel Goh, you have two cuts, please take them together.

Teach for Singapore

Assoc Prof Daniel Goh Pei Siong (Non-Constituency Member): Thank you, Madam. Mdm Chair, no matter how meritocratic our education system is, no matter how well trained our teachers are, there will be inequality in two areas. There will be students coming from underprivileged backgrounds who will need closer attention and motivation, and there are teachers who are, by nature, more caring and motivated to go the extra mile to change the lives of their students.

I ask that the Ministry consider establishing a "Teach for Singapore" programme to match exceptionally motivated teachers to underprivileged students. This will be modelled after the US' "Teach for America" and the United Kingdom's (UK's) "Teach First Programmes", both of which have good track records in improving educational outcomes for underprivileged students. We should, of course, make specific adaptations to the Singapore context.

Practising teachers could apply to join "Teach for Singapore", with a select group chosen each year to train in a one-year diploma programme in counselling, cultural sensitivity and teaching for social mobility. Graduates could then be deployed as "Teach for Singapore" fellows for three years to schools with a high number of students on financial assistance.

"Teach for Singapore" alumni are then free to develop their teaching career. The aim is to create a national core of dedicated alumni who will continue to inspire and improve one another through conferences, courses and retreats. This will seed and grow the pursuit for education and equality and social mobility among our teachers as well as close the school quality gap.

Teacher-Student Ratio

Mdm Chair, the average class sizes at primary and lower secondary levels in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries are 21 and 24 respectively, while MOE's planning parameters are for 30 students per class at lower primary and 40 at upper primary and secondary levels. Only in GEP are class sizes kept at 25 to promote better teacher-student engagement. I understand that the pupil-teacher ratios for primary and secondary schools are equivalent to OECD averages. But teachers in Singapore are deployed to provide support and extra classes for low-progress students rather than to reduce class sizes. However, reducing class sizes will remove the need to provide these extra remedial classes, which reinforce the stressful tuition culture in schools.

Nothing beats the close attention paid to students by the primary teacher in class and only a smaller class size can facilitate this. In line with falling student enrolment numbers and instead of closing down schools and merging them, I ask the Minister to again consider reducing class sizes to the OECD and GEP equivalent.

Civic Consciousness in Schools

Mr Png Eng Huat: Madam, we have spent the first 50 years of our nationhood trying to clean up the country in every sense of the word. I must say we are making some progress, albeit not to the level of civic consciousness like in Japan or Switzerland.

We all know we need to cultivate a mindset of civic consciousness and we need to start young. We all know that but, for some reason, these mindsets get reset rather easily each time we are out in the public. We are taught to clear our own trays from preschool to university, in the army camp and at home, and yet we have so much problem doing that in our hawker centre, food court and even in this Parliament, Madam. I always wonder what is impeding our effort to become a gracious society after 50 years of nationhood. Perhaps, we need to refocus, reset and redouble our effort to achieve that in the next chapter of our history.

Last year, I urged the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources to bring back the spirit of the Keep Singapore Clean campaign. This Committee of Supply (COS), I would like to urge MOE to plant the seeds of civic consciousness into our young again.

We not only need to teach our young about ownership and responsibility, we also need to make them appreciate how hard our cleaners are working every day, and that keeping Singapore clean is not just the job of the cleaners but everyone else's responsibility as well.

Madam, after 50 years of nationhood, we need to make civic consciousness a way of life soon. It has to begin at home and in the school. We have to constantly work to get the mindset right in our young, so that they will lend themselves readily to acts of kindness, volunteer work and philanthropy for the betterment of society when they grow up.

While I urge parents to do their part at home, I urge our schools to teach our children well, so that, together, we can make civic consciousness a way of life.

Building Resilience in Students

Mr Kok Heng Leun (Nominated Member): Madam, I would like to continue my call for "small acts of repair" in my previous speech. Specifically, I am proposing for a focus on emotional and critical learning in children and young people, where responses to issues of loss and changes in life are addressed.

In my encounters working as an educator with children, youths and adults, many have been scarred by deep-seated emotional issues, such as loss, for example, when a child has to part with a long-familiar domestic helper at the end of her contract or when a pet dies or when a child's precious toy is thrown away without his or her knowledge or consent.

There are also cases of more extreme losses and adjustments for the young: when they leave their friends in school and move on; when family members pass away; when their school or classmates die suddenly in accidents or even suicides. It pains us greatly, as adults, to see young people struggle in such circumstances.

What we cannot prevent, we should prevail, we should overcome. The pain and burden of a child in school should be carried by more than just the child. A caring society should begin with a humane school environment, one that places value on compassion as much as competition, and goodwill as much as grades. Emotional upheavals should not be dismissed as personal failure, as if those who go through pain somehow deserve it because they had not done enough to prevent it.

Minister Shanmugam shared about the difficulty of getting whole families to participate in the rehabilitative process when they face problems. Imagine how many more unknown problems exist out there, with families unwilling to speak of their pain, let alone seek help.

In this context, I would like to advocate for schools to take on a proactive role in preparing young people to deal with emotional distress.

Firstly, literature. My predecessor, Nominated Member of Parliament for the arts, Ms Janice Koh, had spoken passionately about the importance of literature. Allow me to quote from an article by Keith Oatley, Professor Emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto:

"The process of entering imagined worlds of fiction builds empathy and improves your ability to take another person's point of view. It can even change your personality...The emotional empathy that is critical to our day-to-day relationships also enables us to picture ourselves living as the characters do when we read fiction."

I would like to suggest that reading sessions become part of our primary and secondary schools' core curriculum and not merely an exercise within the English class. Led by facilitators with strategies, reading sessions can help students access the lives of characters and understand their deeper emotions. In this way, the students can better deal with similar issues that they may be facing.

Secondly, Character and Citizenship Education (CCE). Firstly, I would like to commend MOE in their recent revamp of the pedagogical approach to CCE. Here, I would like to suggest the topic of loss be included in the syllabus at all levels. The content can be scaffolded. For primary school students, we can use relatable stories, like taking care of pets, to examine issues of loss. For higher levels, we can tackle more complex situations. However, the approach must be nuanced. Students have to be guided in the process. And I would think that experiential learning would be a good strategy. Experiential learning builds within the body a memory that does not forget easily and help the students to cope. It is like riding a bicycle. You cannot intellectually learn how to ride a bicycle; you have to go on it, fall. But after a while, you realise that even if you do not ride a bicycle, you will still remember how to do it because your body recalls it for you.

Thirdly, the teachers. To deal with the issues in the classroom may sound very daunting. As it is, the teachers are already swamped with work. I hope that more teachers can be employed, specifically trained to manage these areas of teaching, where a lighter touch is needed and where a safe environment is crucial. Schools may already have existing counsellors. But these operations often appear to be detached from the daily grind of school life – as if being in touch with a counsellor is a sign of weakness or, worse, a taboo. Imagine then if such teacher-counsellors are part and parcel of school life. Imagine if a child can ask questions about algebra and fractions in one class, and then talk about the pain of losing her favourite cat minutes later. The message is simple: we care about you and not just how well you do.

These are some of my suggestions which I hope MOE, in partnership with the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth (MCCY) and the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF), will consider. I believe that a multi-agency approach is required to effect this change in our social, familial and education systems. Some may think that my proposals would mean that parents are excused from their responsibilities. I would, however, like to suggest a paradigm shift: let us begin work on the young, so that as they grow in their ability to handle change and loss, they, in turn, can be the living examples that their children can learn from. Would this not be groundbreaking, effective and empowering?

12.15 pm

As I speak, I remember this young adolescent whom I taught, who cuts himself to stop his girlfriend from cutting herself also. The best story was his mother left home when he was very young. His father never explained to him why he had to go through this. He is living through the pain and, now, he does not want his girlfriend to go.

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhaur said: mostly, it is loss which teaches us the worth of things.

Cyber Education

Miss Cheng Li Hui (Tampines): Madam, cybercrimes and online scams have been on the rise and it is not surprising with the majority of Singaporeans accessing the Internet every day across different platforms.

According to the "Annual Survey on Infocomm Usage in Households and by Individuals 2014", 54% of our children aged between seven and 14, and 92% of our young aged 15 to 24 use portable infocomm equipment to connect to the Internet wirelessly.

While they are tech-savvy, they may or may not be Internet-savvy. They are comfortable navigating the Internet and may forget there are real dangers lurking in cyberspace which they have to guard and protect themselves against. Cyberbullying, online predators and online scams are just some of the dangers that youths face.

Some people believe that it is the parents' duty to protect their children from online threats. While this may be true, it is difficult for parents to monitor and control the online behaviour of their children. Parents are often less tech-savvy than their children.

We have to equip our children and youths with the skills to navigate the Internet safely and to differentiate between fact and fiction, outdated news and incorrect sources.

Hence, may I ask the Ministry for an update on the Cyber Wellness programmes in our schools and whether they also include IHLs? Would the Ministry also share what other initiatives will be implemented to promote cyber safety?

The Chairman: Dr Lim Wee Kiak.

Support for Academically Weak Students

Dr Lim Wee Kiak (Sembawang): Chairman, it is a well-known fact that students learn and develop at different rates and different pace at different periods of their lives. Some are fast learners during the early years and plateau as they grow older while some are late bloomers. MOE has set the noble mission of inculcating learning for mastery, learning throughout life and learning for life.

In our very fast-paced formal education system, how does the proposed learning for mastery fit in? For some students who may need more time to master their subjects, they will lag behind their peers if insufficient time is given to achieve mastery. They may pass the tests and exams with just above 50 marks and get promoted to next level. When they reach the next level, the difficulty level of the subject is going to be raised another notch. Since they did not have a chance to master the subject, their weak foundation will give way and they may lose interest in learning the subject.

I am concerned with under-performing students, in particular, those from low-income families. Not every home is able to offer a conducive environment to study, especially for those in rental flats where space is limited and those from dysfunctional families. Poverty becomes a vicious cycle and social mobility is hindered. Some students fall into bad company when they get discouraged by their poor performance and there is no one at home to supervise them. There are teachers who would stay back after school on their own accord and at their own expense. This is very commendable. Nevertheless, we cannot expect every teacher to do so, because of the heavy workload.

I hope that there is more assistance from the self-help groups which offer student care services at subsidised rates. They are planning to join hands to run as many as 30 centres. I am concerned whether they have enough resources. Does the Ministry have any plan to support them? What is the Ministry doing to track these weaker students and their progress and give them more support? What is being done to help those whose parents cannot afford tuition? Is there an early warning system so that the Ministry can intervene when a weak student is spotted?

Sugar in Schools

Mr Chen Show Mao: Madam, the great harm done to our bodies by the unchecked consumption of refined sugar and other types of sugar is increasingly clear. Research has also shown that eating habits and food preferences are acquired when young and are more difficult to change after adolescence. Our schools, therefore, have an important role to play to help foster healthy eating habits and food preferences in young Singaporeans.

I wish to commend MOE and the Health Promotion Board (HPB) for their efforts in the area, resulting in the "Healthy Meals in Schools" programme in 2016. I would like to learn about other proposed efforts in the area and look forward to the testing of innovative policy solutions in this area, perhaps developed in partnership with the private and people sectors. I hope these will enable the Ministry and HPB to further cut down the amount of sugar allowed in the food and drinks sold in our schools, be they juice, carbonated, or other types of drinks, for the further promotion of health among our school children.

Partnership with Parents and Community

Mr Zainal Sapari (Pasir Ris-Punggol): Mdm Chairperson, the need to build and strengthen family-school-community partnerships is now recognised as essential towards helping students achieve at their maximum potential. Many schools now realise that the job of educating students cannot be achieved by their efforts alone. Rather, it requires a collaborative effort with families, communities and other stakeholders.

In most of our schools, there is some measure of parent and community involvement and it is usually directed and guided by the schools, with the main focus being on fundraising initiatives, volunteering and supporting school activities. However, moving forward, I feel community partnership should go beyond such traditional engagement and be expanded to involve families and the broader community in decision-making and school governance.

When schools actively involve parents and engage community resources, they are able to respond more effectively to the learning needs and create an environment conducive to the general well-being of the students.

As Stephen Covey said "Synergy catalyses, unifies and unleashes the greatest power within people". Hence, I would like to know whether MOE has plans to give more support to the schools to strengthen partnerships of schools with parents and the community.

Primary School Registration Scheme

Mr Lim Biow Chuan (Mountbatten): Mdm Chair, many studies have suggested that young children of school-going age ought to get adequate rest every day. To do so, they should not have to wake up very early in the morning and then make their way to school which may be 30-45 minutes away from home.

Our current primary school registration system does not give priority purely based on proximity to schools. Several other factors are considered like whether a sibling is at the same school, whether the parent is a former student or alumni from that school or whether the parents are linked to the school through a religious order, clan association or community leader.

I acknowledge the importance of each factor in wanting schools to have links to former students and to develop a school culture. These are important factors.

However, whatever reason a parent has for wanting a child to attend a particular primary school, it simply does not make sense for young six- or seven-year-old students to have to travel more than 20 minutes to attend their school.

I urge MOE to review the current primary school priority system. We should discourage parents living more than five kilometres away from the school from sending their child to the school and give greater priority to students living near the school. This way, the students benefit from having more time to sleep and not having to wake up at some unearthly hour.

Compulsory Education

Dr Intan Azura Mokhtar: The Compulsory Education Act implemented since 2003 has been instrumental in ensuring that our children have at least six years of primary education. Although the Act is in force and there are penalties under the Act to act as a deterrent, the responsibility of sending children to school for primary education and ensuring they remain in school during those six years still remains with the parents.

I support compulsory education as I believe our children need a solid educational foundation that is not just about gaining knowledge, but also includes social interaction and developing communication skills. However, I would like to propose that the Ministry consider extending compulsory education even earlier, to the preschool level.

Substantial research has shown that a child's learning ability is at its peak between the ages of two and five years. Their language ability increases manifold, moving from knowing about 50 words at the age of two, to at least 1,000 words by the age of five, when they learn to think, reason, read, count and identity colours, their body parts, the planets, the solar system, the different dinosaurs and just about every other category of objects.

They also develop their social and emotional intelligence during these crucial years and, by age five, they would have learnt how to make friends and remember their friends' names and birthdays.

Based on an earlier reply from MSF, the number of children of ages five to six who do not attend any form of preschool has declined from about 5% in 2006 to 0.8% in 2012 and, in 2015, this figure remains below 1%. This is encouraging as efforts to reach out to their families have shown success.

However, there is still the 1% or so, or around 250 children each year. For this group of children, they start Primary 1 without much preschool preparation and with what, I believe, to be insufficient optimum cognitive and socio-emotional development.

MOE has already embarked on providing preschool education and has established MOE Kindergartens which now number about 15 centres around the island. Accessibility and affordability to preschool education would not be a prohibitive factor for parents not to send their children to preschool. I would propose that MOE look into bringing forward compulsory education to before Primary 1. It would be ideal to start compulsory education at the Kindergarten 1 (K1) level, but it would be good enough, for now, to begin compulsory education at the K2 level.

The intent is not to make it difficult for parents or to enforce the Compulsory Education Act on them. The intent is really to ensure that our children have an earlier start at developing cognitive, social and communication skills, and to give a boost to children from less privileged families to help them have a better start at primary school.

Early Childhood Education

Dr Lim Wee Kiak: Mdm Chair, the schemes introduced in the Budget to support families with children are welcome measures and certainly encouraging to those who have just started a family. It would also encourage others to start a family in the near future as well. Nevertheless, parents in Singapore are rightfully very concerned about education opportunities for their children. Accessibility and affordability of related services, preschool education in particular, are the concerns of parents.

I have spoken, like many other Members in this House, on the importance of early childhood education on the overall development of our children and have appealed to the Government to put in more resources to enhance early childhood education as it is an important social leveller. I have also proposed that the Government build larger early childhood education centres similar to our primary schools instead of tucking them at void decks. Will MOE consider starting mega early childhood centres or kindergartens so that there are economies of scale and better career prospects for our early childhood educators? Can MOE consider using the premises of soon-to-be closed secondary schools to run this project?

In the past years, the Government has done quite a lot to enhance the quality of early childhood education, keep fees affordable and increase the number of early childhood education centres in Singapore. Early childhood educators are getting more relevant training as well as employment perks. But to create a children-friendly society that embraces the concept of families, we have to do more to enhance the quality of the centres that we have in Singapore now. Currently, there are 15 MOE-run kindergartens, including the new ones to be set up this year, as well as 169 run by partner operators. How adequate is the current supply of early childhood education centres in matching the demand? What are the plans in place to expand this network of early childhood education? We should consider investing in the training of early childhood educators and the pedagogy of doing so. We are dealing with the foundation years which are very important to our students.

Over the years, there has been an upward trend in the number of preschoolers diagnosed with developmental issues like speech and language delays, learning difficulties and autism spectrum disorders. How aware and well-prepared are our early childhood educators in identifying these problems to facilitate early diagnosis and intervention?

Many families have both parents who are working. They usually put their children in a full-day childcare centre or kindergarten. When the child enrols in a primary school, after-school care services are critical for this group. There seems to be a mismatch between full-day childcare and after-school care services. Can the Government do a more accurate projection of the demand for after-school care services in each estate by the number of children who are in full-day childcare?

A news report in 2014 revealed that the demand for vacancies in after-school care services was so overwhelming that in some primary schools, they are holding ballots to enrol their students in their student care services. Most parents prefer to put their children in after-school care services in the same primary school. Since all primary schools are going single session, can the Ministry put an after-school care service in all primary schools and cater to all students who need it?

The Ministry had announced plans to increase the number of student care centres to about 120 by 2015. Can the Minister update the House on the status of this programme? When can we see all our 190 primary schools having their student care centres? I hope MOE can ramp up the number of student care centres faster to cater for the demand to match MSF's rate of ramping up childcare centres.

12.30 pm

The Chairman: Ms Chia Yong Yong, please take your two cuts together.

Ms Chia Yong Yong (Nominated Member): Thank you, Madam. The first cut on —

The Chairman: Sorry, Ms Chia. I think I have forgotten Mr Zainal Sapari. My apologies. Mr Zainal Sapari first.

Efforts to Improve Preschool Education

Mr Zainal Sapari: Mdm Speaker, I support the call by Dr Intan Azura for compulsory education to be brought forward.

Bill Gates said, "The first five years have so much to do with how the next 80 turns out." The importance of preschool education cannot be underestimated and, hence, we must make it a priority to invest in preschool education so that we open the doors of opportunity to every child and help them acquire the skills they need for a meaningful learning to realise their dreams.

Hence, I was heartened that MOE started piloting MOE Kindergartens (MKs) in 2014 to offer quality and affordable pre-school education, and there are now 15 such centres.

Compared to private preschool education, MOE has more resources to develop a comprehensive preschool curriculum. I would like MOE to provide an update on programmes and resources that will be made available to more pre-school centres to support them in building this strong foundation.

Will MOE develop a framework to share the expertise with private school operators? Such a framework to support private-school operators will level up standards to ensure quality preschool education will be accessible to all, just like general education in all our mainstream schools. It is my dream that any child can get the best quality preschool education, regardless of the fees that the parents are paying.

The Chairman: Ms Chia, please take your two cuts together.

Disability Support Offices and Special Education Needs

Ms Chia Yong Yong: Thank you, Madam. The setting up of Disability Support Offices (DSOs) in 2014 in all publicly-funded tertiary institutions was a great step of facilitation for students with disabilities in such institutions.

In addition, Singaporean students with physical or sensory-related impairments who are in such tertiary institutions may tap upon the Special Education Needs (SEN) fund to purchase assistive technology devices and supporting services, such as signing interpretation and Braille printing.

Could the Minister let us know:

(a) the number of students who have received assistance from DSOs to date and the nature and outcome of such assistance;

(b) the number of students who have utilised the SEN fund and the average amount utilised;

(c) whether the Ministry is satisfied with the take-up rate; and

(d) what measures would the Ministry be taking to facilitate students taking up more of such services?

Allied Educators

Currently, all primary schools are staffed with at least one AED(LBS) to support students with mild special educational needs (SENs).

As of July 2015, 81 secondary schools have each been resourced with one AED(LBS) to support students with mild SENs. About 10% to 20% of teachers in every mainstream school are trained to have a deeper knowledge and skills to support students with special needs. In addition, all newly-recruited allied educators are required to attend a one-year, full-time Diploma in Special Education Programme conducted by the National Institute of Education (NIE).

MOE is continuing to train teachers in special needs, and I thank the Ministry for that. The current training, unfortunately, is undertaken by individual schools on a request basis where special potential training providers submit training proposals.

Can I suggest that the Ministry consider, specifically approaching training providers for more efficiency and greater efficacy in outcome?

More Support for Special Needs Students

Mr Zainal Sapari: Mdm Chair, I am aware that MOE is supporting schools with special needs children through the deployment of Special Needs Officers (SNOs), but the support is insufficient. Hence, parents with special needs children would prefer their children to be in specialised schools where there is better support, but either there are no vacancies in those schools or the cost of putting their child in these specialised schools is too expensive as they may not be eligible for subsidies.

I would like MOE to consider improving the ratio of SNOs to the number of special needs children in schools. MOE should also consider having more special needs schools and providing more support for special needs children. Ideally, the school fees must be the same as those paid by students in mainstream schools.

Every parent wants the best for their child and I believe there is something that we can do as the Government to show that, indeed, we care for every Singaporean student.

The Chairman: Acting Minister Ng Chee Meng.

The Acting Minister for Education (Schools) (Mr Ng Chee Meng): Mdm Chair, I would like to thank all the Members for sharing their views and suggestions.

All of us value education, as individuals and also as a society. For individual students and families, it is a journey of hopes and aspirations, as well as anxieties. For the country, education is a strategic pillar of nation-building and economic and social development. It is important to take both perspectives as we evolve our education system with the changing times.

Today, I will be speaking about what we must do differently and how to make a paradigm shift away from an over-emphasis on academics, in order to better prepare our children and people for the future.

This is a significant shift for MOE, together with all our stakeholders. It will involve not just the schools, but also our IHLs, parents and our industry and community partners.

Minister Ong Ye Kung and I will talk about this shift today.

Many Members have spoken about global developments as well as changes in the local operating environment, such as our ageing population and shrinking workforce. These will impact Singapore, our security and economy. Challenges and uncertainties are unavoidable. But I believe we can be optimistic. With changes, there will also be new opportunities, such as the growth of frontier markets and disruptive innovations like robotics, 3D printing and the Internet of Things.

The Committee on the Future Economy (CFE) is looking at how Singapore can reframe the way we add value to the world and enable our people to be future-ready. MOE supports this effort closely in our schools and IHLs. Our education system must prepare our future generations to embrace this increasingly complex and dynamic world and preserve and strengthen the cohesiveness of our society.

This goes beyond providing our children with academic knowledge. It includes helping them to learn the right values and attitudes, and the broader attributes and competencies to navigate the demands of life and work. They will need to be adaptable and resilient to face uncertainties and change. Just as important, they must grow up with a heart for Singapore and fellow Singaporeans.

Hence, the education that we gift our children should be holistic. Every child should be provided with opportunities to discover and develop his or her strengths and interests in multiple domains. Every child should grow up a well-rounded individual, a lifelong learner who pursues mastery and fulfilment in a domain of his or her choice. I believe that this is the best way forward to prepare our young people and nation for the future.

To prepare our children for the future, we need a collective paradigm shift. Let me elaborate what this shift entails for MOE and schools and, just as importantly, what it means to parents and students.

Today, academic excellence is a hallmark of the Singapore education system. Our students rank highly in international benchmarking studies. We are recognised for the high standards that we have achieved. However, the focus of our education system should go beyond test scores. Currently, despite our efforts to move towards a holistic education, there is still a narrow emphasis on academics and paper qualifications. This is deeply ingrained in our culture, translated into the expectations of our children, parents and teachers. Eventually, this is perhaps even manifested in the employers’ mindsets at workplaces.

We need a better balance in our students' education journey. This means dialling back the excessive focus on academics. We need to free up time and space to nurture other dimensions that are just as important for our children's development. Let them not just study the flowers, but also stop to smell the flowers and wonder at their beauty. We want to cultivate a generation of young people who grow up with a sense of curiosity and a love for learning, asking both the "whys" and, sometimes, even the "why-nots".

But this would not be an easy or straightforward thing to do. As we often say, in education, it takes a village to raise a child, but that also means it takes the whole village to change the way we raise a child. MOE and our fraternity of educators have taken the lead and made improvements to policies, structures and processes over time. I thank Ms Denise Phua for her endorsements.

But policy changes can only go so far. This is not something that MOE can do unilaterally or from the top down.

We need a partnership with parents and the community to make this shift, and this will take time. Students, parents, educators and employers must come on board and adjust mindsets and behaviours as well, together with MOE.

On MOE's part, we will address this paradigm shift in three ways: one, we will put more emphasis on non-academic aspects of learning; two, we will reduce excessive focus on academic results; and three, we will offer more opportunities for different forms of merit and achievements to be recognised.

Let me explain the first point on placing more emphasis on non-academic learning.

Dr Intan Azura Mokhtar, Mr Seah Kian Peng, Mr Leon Perera and Ms Kuik Shiao-Yin touched on the importance of non-academic learning as part of holistic education. I agree fully that good character, socio-emotional competencies and other skills like critical thinking and effective communication are necessary foundations for work and life.

Schools leverage curricular and co-curricular programmes to design meaningful learning opportunities and provide students with regular feedback to help them develop in these non-academic aspects.

For example, subjects, such as design and technology and project work, provide avenues for students to develop creativity and innovation. Students also get opportunities to develop and apply leadership, initiative and collaboration through Values-in-Action (VIA) projects and CCAs.

I am glad to share that our schools regularly review the progress of our students and the effectiveness of all programmes in developing our students holistically, not just in their academics.

Ms Kuik spoke about redesigning student report cards to reflect non-academic attributes. In fact, this is already being done.

At the end of each school year, a Holistic Development Profile of each child is provided in the report card given to parents. Parents are able to see not just academic grades but also the student's participation and achievement in different school programmes as well as a description of the child's personal qualities, such as responsibility, teamwork and perseverance.

We are making progress towards holistic education, but this remains a journey.

I thank Dr Intan Mokhtar and Mr Chen Show Mao for bringing up the value of CCAs and values-in-action, or VIA.

Our students can discover their interests and develop their character and strengths through a range of CCAs and school programmes. All these are important educational goals. MOE encourages students to participate in CCAs, even if they do not represent their schools. We will strive towards this across schools, subject to limited school resources.

They are also given the flexibility to join various CCAs throughout their education journey, or take more than one CCA if they so wish, provided they can cope. Outdoor Education (OE) is another platform that provides rich learning experiences outside the classroom for building resilience, tenacity and ruggedness in our youth.

Since 2014, we have set aside formal curriculum time in all primary and secondary schools for OE as part of physical education (PE) lessons. School camps are another way of immersing our students in authentic and often challenging situations, where they need to work in teams and learn to take responsibility for decisions they make. These experiences develop a culture of self-reliance and mutual support with their peers.

12.45 pm

On a recent camp visit, I met some Primary 5 students who were learning how to cook a simple meal outdoors with instant noodles. For some of them, it was the first time they had ever lit a matchstick.

On another occasion, I was told the story of a group of Secondary 1 students who boiled water in mess tins over an open fire to make hot chocolate. They shared that it was the most delicious hot chocolate that they had ever tasted, simply because they made it. I was heartened to see that even simple activities like these can help our children build a sense of independence and appreciation for daily comforts. Small as these examples may be, they are meaningful and much needed experiences.

Today, our students participate in about two or three school cohort camps at upper primary and secondary levels. Going forward, I am happy to announce that we will enhance the cohort camp experiences for all students as part of our National Outdoor Adventure Education Master Plan.

Over the next few years, we will progressively rejuvenate and upgrade camp facilities at our MOE Outdoor Adventure Learning Centres. We will offer new camp programmes and raise the competencies of camp facilitators.

The school cohort camps and OE in PE lessons will lead up to a five-day expedition-based camp for all Secondary 3 students held at the Outward Bound School (OBS) on Coney Island and Pulau Ubin. MOE will co-design the camp programme with OBS, pilot it with some schools starting in 2017 and roll it out across all schools from 2020. We are also partnering MCCY to build the new OBS campus on Coney Island. This camp provides a unique opportunity for students from different schools to collaborate and overcome challenges in the outdoors. Their common experience will contribute towards building a stronger Singaporean identity, a point raised by Mr Seah Kian Peng.

Under the National Outdoor Adventure Education Master Plan, MOE will also continue to partner outdoor adventure service providers to offer varied programmes to our schools, both locally and overseas. They have expertise that our schools can tap on. Together with OBS and other partners, MOE is committed to raising the quality and quantity of our outdoor adventure learning programmes for our students.

To date, many students have benefited from their OBS experience, including our Prime Minister, who shared on his Facebook page how OBS was a significant growing-up experience for him.

Michelle Chua is a Secondary 4 student from Jurongville Secondary School who also had a memorable OBS experience in Pulau Ubin.

She recounted how her team lost their way on the second day of a three-day land-trekking expedition. This set the team back by several hours, probably delaying their dinner time. Despite the hunger and exhaustion, the group of students encouraged one another and sang in unison to motivate one another on the way back. That night, when they arrived back at camp, they were last among all the teams. But they kept their spirits high and were unfazed by this setback. The next day, with better planning and teamwork to navigate and pace their trek, they came in first. Interestingly, it was not the victory that Michelle was most proud of; it was the comeback of the team and the "can-do" spirit that gave her the greatest sense of achievement. This is character-building.

Let me stress that the safety of our students remains paramount even as we enhance and expand OE. We have appointed an Advisory Panel for Outdoor Adventure Learning to help us raise the quality and safety of our outdoor adventure learning programmes, both locally and overseas. The panel will be chaired by Dr Tan Lai Yong, who is well-regarded for his work with the youths and community and who is currently Director for Outreach and Community Engagement at the College of Alice and Peter Tan at the National University of Singapore (NUS).

The second, and a very key part of the shift that we want to achieve, is to reduce excessive focus on academic results. Ms Denise Phua, Dr Intan Mokhtar and Mr Seah Kian Peng spoke on this, especially with regard to the PSLE.

Today, there is a deeply ingrained mindset that the PSLE is a very high-stakes exam. Many perceive that a child's PSLE T-score at the age of 12 determines his or her success and pathway in life. But we know that this is not true, from the many stories of many who have done well in life despite not having done so well in PSLE. What we observe is that a student's PSLE indicates the progress that a child has made in his or her learning in primary school, but it does not cast in stone what he or she can achieve in the future, in life.

Yet, such a mindset has persisted. And as a parent, I can empathise with that. It is easy to get fixated on what is measurable. We put a score on something and that makes it easy for us to compare with one another. But what is measurable, sometimes, may not be what is most important in the long run. Chasing after that last point in an exam could come at a cost to other aspects of our children's overall development, especially at a young age: too many anxious late nights, too much tuition and too little quality time for family and friends, for play and for exploration.

Ms Kuik Shiao-Yin raised concerns that the amount of homework that our children have is excessive. Given appropriately, homework reinforces students' learning, contributes to their progress and cultivates a healthy disposition towards learning. However, I agree that more is not always better, and the amount of homework has to be calibrated appropriately.

All our schools have put in place a homework policy and mechanisms to regulate, monitor and coordinate homework across departments and subjects.

People often draw comparisons between education and botany. I am not much of a gardener, but I did plant some green beans for a school project when I was a small boy. I remember waking up each morning, impatiently monitoring my glass jar day after day, waiting for the first shoot to sprout. I soon realised that over-watering my seedlings did not make them grow any faster. In fact, it stifled them. I believe our children, like young seedlings, ought to have time and space to breathe, learn and dream.

So, there is a need to reduce this over-emphasis on academic results. We have made several steps in this direction over the last few years. For example, in 2012, we stopped naming the top PSLE scorers. Today, we celebrate students' performance in all domains, across both academic and non-academic areas. But we can do more to change mind-sets and culture.

The Prime Minster had announced in 2013 that we would review the PSLE scoring system. I would like to share an update on this today.

The main issue to address is that the way we currently score PSLE is too precise and differentiates our students more finely than necessary. A student may score one point more than his friend at PSLE, but educationally, that one point does not mean that he is better prepared for secondary school than his friend. It also does not mean that he is very much smarter or will grow up to be more capable or lead a more successful or fulfilling life. We should therefore, in time, move away from such fine distinctions, which are not meaningful, especially at that young age.

The way that the T-score is calculated may have also created unhealthy competition among our young children. Because it is calculated based on how students do relative to one another, students may feel the pressure to do better than their peers rather than help one another out to learn. This runs counter to the values we want to inculcate in our children. We can find a better balance between encouraging our students to study hard and get good results, and making them overly-competitive and anxious about outdoing one another.

Our over-arching objective in the primary school years is to build strong foundations for learning in our children. After studying the issues carefully, we propose to make a few changes to the PSLE scoring system.

First, we will replace the PSLE T-Score with wider scoring bands, and the new system will be similar to the GCE "O" and "A" levels. Some broad level of differentiation is still needed to guide students to academic programmes that best suit their interests and strengths. But the scoring will be blunted to a large extent.

Also, similar to the "O" and "A" levels, we will move towards a scoring system that is more reflective of a student's learning and level of mastery. Once a student shows a level of understanding and ability that meets the professionally-set standard, he will receive the grade, regardless of how his peers may perform. This is more educationally meaningful than assessing a student's performance relative to his peers.

We know that there will be many questions about how these changes would impact secondary school posting. We intend to make some adjustments to the Secondary 1 posting system as well. It will still be a fair and transparent system based on academic merit.

With the move to broader PSLE scoring bands, students will be able to choose a school that is a good fit for them from a wider range of schools of a similar academic profile. In doing so, students can consider factors, such as the school's distinctive programmes, CCAs, and partnerships with the community and industry, and better match these factors with their interests.

These planned changes are significant. So, MOE will not rush the implementation. The current PSLE system is well-established and we must be fully ready before moving to the new system.

So, we will take the next few years to work through these changes carefully. We have already begun our journey of evolving our school landscape. We want to give all schools time to develop their distinctive strengths and niche programmes towards the vision of every school a good school. This remains important. Meanwhile, we will need to develop and test the new PSLE scoring and posting systems thoroughly. Most importantly, we want to give enough time and support for parents and students to understand and adjust, so that they are ready when the new system takes effect.

So, we are planning for the new PSLE scoring system to be put in place from 2021. This will start with the Primary 6 cohort of 2021, who are in Primary 1 this year. Details about the changes to PSLE scoring will be released in the next two to three months.

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Over the next few months, MOE will be working closely with our school leaders and educators on the proposed changes. We will subsequently also engage parents and members of the public on these changes and provide an update at the COS debate in 2017.

The third part of this paradigm shift is to offer more opportunities for different expressions of merit and achievements, across all schools.

Academic merit continues to be important in secondary school posting, because our primary school students should be matched to secondary schools that would be a good fit for their aptitudes. However, there is scope for greater flexibility in how we recognise different forms of merit and achievements in the overall Secondary 1 posting system. We want to encourage students and parents to choose schools carefully, so that they can select a school which can best nurture their interests and strengths.

The DSA scheme was introduced back in 2004 for this very purpose. The intent of DSA is to open up opportunities for students to be recognised for a range of achievements and talents when seeking admission into secondary school. It also allows some flexibility on the school's part to admit students with specific aptitudes, so that the distinctive programmes offered by the school benefit the right profile of students.

The DSA scheme has benefited many students. I recently visited Admiralty Secondary School and met a Secondary 3 boy. His name is Jun Heng; he is somewhat of a shy and quiet boy. However, behind his soft-spoken demeanour, I discovered a bright young man full of passion for programming and robotics. There is a sparkle in his eyes when he speaks about robotics.

Jun Heng has had an interest in robotics since he joined his primary school's robotics club. He was so eager to pursue this further in secondary school that he applied through DSA to join Admiralty Secondary School, which has a well-known robotics enterprise programme and won many national and international competitions.

When I asked him why he likes robotics so much, he said, quite simply to me, "Because there are no limits to what you can do". That is what inspired me about Jun Heng's story. This young man makes his choices and takes concrete steps towards his dreams with conviction. I am very glad that he chose a school that is a great fit for him and I wish him all the very best.

There are many more students like Jun Heng who begin to discover their passions early, through their CCAs or activities. These can be further nurtured in secondary school.

By 2017, all our secondary schools will offer two distinctive programmes in various domains, through the Applied Learning Programme (ALP) and the Learning for Life Programme (LLP). With a more diverse and vibrant secondary school landscape, we want to enable more students to benefit from the DSA scheme and tap on the range of programmes our schools offer. This will complement the changes to the PSLE system.

Learning from more than a decade of implementing DSA, we know that many students have benefited from this opportunity. At the same time, there is some unevenness in how different schools select their DSA students.

It is timely, therefore, to take a step back and see how to realign the implementation of this scheme with its original policy intent. In this regard, MOE is undertaking a review of the DSA scheme, with two guiding principles.

First, we would like to expand opportunities in more secondary schools for students with specific aptitudes and talents to enter a school with distinctive programmes via DSA. This will provide students with more options when selecting a school that can best nurture their interests and talents.

Second, we would sharpen the focus of DSA to better recognise talents and achievements in specific domains, rather than general academic ability that can be demonstrated through the PSLE.

MOE will consider the views on DSA shared by Ms Denise Phua and Dr Intan, and we will share more details about the DSA review in due course.

In sum, with changes to the PSLE scoring system, DSA and a more variegated secondary school landscape, we will create more opportunities and choices for students at the Secondary 1 posting juncture.

I want to encourage all our students to consider carefully which secondary schools offer education pathways and opportunities that are best suited for you, based on your specific aptitudes and aspirations. Get to know your schools better, beyond their cut-off points. If you do not quite know what you want to do yet or are passionate about, that is okay, too.

Whichever school you choose to go, give yourself the time and space to explore different domains and learn new things. Enjoy the learning journey. MOE and our educators will be there to support you.

At the same time, we are committed to investing in all schools and providing the resources to develop our students holistically and fully.

Mr Png Eng Huat and Mr Dennis Tan asked about how we fund our schools equitably. MOE resources schools based on the needs of students, programmes offered by the schools and the enrolment of the schools.

Over the years, we have significantly increased funding for education across all levels and schools. In fact, where we could, within our limited resources, we have been more generous in allocating more for our mainstream schools.

Besides funding, we also ensure that our schools are adequately resourced with teachers to meet the needs of our students. We decided more than a decade ago to grow the teaching workforce. Over the past 10 years, the average pupil-teacher ratio (PTR) has improved from 23 to 16 for primary schools, and from 19 to 13 for secondary schools. I would like to highlight that PTR, an aggregate measure of our teaching force, is not the same as class size, which depends on how teachers are deployed in schools.

Assoc Prof Daniel Goh enquired if we could reduce the class sizes in mainstream schools to the levels in OECD countries.

Rather than reducing class sizes across the board, we adopt the approach to deploy resources in a much more targeted way, to support areas of greater educational need. This allows our schools to implement appropriate intervention strategies and give individual attention to low-progress students and students with special learning needs.

For example, levelling up programmes are in smaller groups of about eight to 10 in pull-out classes; and the School-based Dyslexia Remediation (SDR) programme goes down to four students per class. We think this is a better and more inclusive approach to deploy the limited resources that we have.

Furthermore, it is not conclusive that smaller class sizes improve student outcomes on a system-wide basis. In fact, studies show that teacher quality matters much more. While we do not rule out further improvements in class sizes, we must balance this carefully with what is sustainable, and not risk compromising the quality of teachers we recruit.

We also want to help students to be posted to schools that can cater to their learning needs and interests. I spoke about the changes to the Secondary 1 posting and school landscape earlier, which will provide more choices and opportunities for posting.

For younger students in primary schools, we recognise that the distance between home and school is also an important consideration for school choices and posting. Mr Lim Biow Chuan asked if MOE could review the current Primary 1 (P1) registration framework to give more priority to students living near primary schools.

The P1 registration framework carefully balances various factors and is not limited to just home-school distance. Other factors include elder siblings, community involvement and the schools' ties with their stakeholders.

Overall, the system works. In the past few years, about 98% of Singapore Citizen and Permanent Resident students obtained a place in either a school of their choice or one that is within two kilometres of their residence.

Nevertheless, I would like to assure Mr Lim Biow Chuan that MOE will continue to ensure sufficient school places on a regional basis, so that our young children will not have to travel far to primary school. Mdm Chair, allow me to say a few words in Mandarin, please.

(In Mandarin): [Please refer to Vernacular Speech.] I mentioned in my English speech that in order to make the shift towards holistic education, we have to adjust our mindsets and reduce the excessive emphasis on academic results. Therefore, MOE will be making changes to the PSLE scoring and the Secondary 1 posting systems. In addition, MOE will also promote OE to nurture resilience, ruggedness and tenacity in our students.

Every child is like a seedling. We should not be overly anxious and rush their growth, as pulling young seedlings harms them instead. Nor should we over-shelter them, or they will become delicate flowers that are unable to weather the storms of life. We have to understand and balance the different needs of each seedling and nurture them with care. With adequate sunlight, water and space, our children can freely grow into sturdy trees that are firmly rooted.

We must nurture future generations of Singaporeans who are not only successful, but also have a sense of belonging, national identity and care for fellow citizens. Therefore, we will continue to emphasise character education in our schools in order to cultivate the right values in our students from a young age. These outcomes may not be easily measured, but they last through life and help our children to be better-prepared for the future. We can then nurture a strong "Singapore Heartbeat", united towards our common vision.

(In English): Mdm Chair, let me now speak about an inclusive education system. We must ensure that every Singaporean can find their own pathway to success and be part of the nation's progress, regardless of their starting points and background. This is the essence of a united Singapore Heartbeat that I spoke about in my maiden speech.

An inclusive education system is a critical lever to close societal gaps and promote social mobility. While we cannot ensure equal outcomes, we must provide children equal access to opportunities in all our schools.

Ms Denise Phua and Dr Lim Wee Kiak asked for an update on what MOE is doing further to level the playing field for students from disadvantaged backgrounds and provide dedicated support to those who are academically weaker.

Children enter our schools with different starting points, abilities and learning needs. We must continue to do our utmost to provide pathways for every child.

First, we have levelling-up and specialised intervention programmes for students weak in literacy and numeracy skills, such as the Learning Support Programmes for English and Mathematics in Primary 1 and 2. Beyond Primary 2, low-progress students continue to be supported through other programmes all the way to secondary school.

Second, for students who may need a different, more customised approach, we have also developed four Specialised Schools.

Students who do not pass their PSLE articulate to Northlight School (NLS) and Assumption Pathway School (APS), while Crest Secondary and Spectra Secondary Schools cater to Normal (Technical)-eligible students who prefer an applied curriculum. These Specialised Schools adopt a whole-school approach and customise their curriculum and pedagogy to the learning needs of their students.

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Third, and very importantly, we resource schools and train teachers to support our low-progress learners. The Learning Support Programmes that I mentioned earlier are centrally-designed and taught by teachers who are specially trained to engage low-progress learners and be able to address not just their academic needs but their socio-emotional needs effectively. Our goal is not just to help them level up in their studies, but also to develop their self-confidence and self-esteem.

As a result of these efforts, the proportion of these students in our system has beenreduced significantly over the years and is among the lowest internationally.

I would like to address Assoc Prof Daniel Goh's specific suggestion for MOE to set up a national corps of specially trained teachers for underprivileged students. As I have explained, we already have differentiated and dedicated support for low-progress learners, including those from needy families. Our context and approach are quite different from many other countries. We are able to centrally train and deploy teachers, being a small country. So, I am proud to say that we already have a national corps of well-trained teachers for all students.

Students with financial needs should benefit from a quality education, regardless of their family's circumstances. Mr Muhamad Faisal Abdul Manap asked about the extension of assistance schemes, awards and funds.

MOE heavily subsidises the cost of education for all Singaporean students in our schools. In addition, we provide targeted assistance for needy Singaporean students in our schools through various schemes, such as the Edusave Merit Bursary, MOE and school-based Financial Assistance Schemes (FAS) and the Post-Secondary Education Account.

Many Members, including Mr Zainal Sapari and Dr Lim Wee Kiak, have asked about what more we can do in early childhood to provide every child with a strong start. Minister of State Janil Puthucheary will give more details on MOE's efforts in this area. He will provide an update on how we are enhancing support for children with special educational needs. This is an issue that Ms Denise Phua, Ms Chia Yong Yong and Mr Zainal Sapari spoke passionately about just now.

Mdm Chair, let me conclude. I earlier used the metaphors of flowers and seedlings. Well, there is one more. The Chinese proverb "十年树木，百年树人" compares the task of nurturing people to growing trees – it takes 10 years to grow trees, but 100 to nurture people. Education is a far more complex and arduous task than growing trees; nevertheless, we can extract useful insights.

As gardeners, we must tend our seedlings with great skill, care and love by ensuring that the plant has sufficient, but not overly harsh sunlight, and watering the plant based on how much the soil can take. More importantly, as the seedlings grow and take root, we should hold back and give them enough space and freedom to flourish. We must not over-shelter them or suffocate them with too much watering and over-fertilising, but allow them to grow upright, strong and sturdy and resilient to any storms.

Today, I fear we are overcrowding our young ones with a narrow focus on academics. While we have their best interests at heart, too much of one thing impedes, rather than supports, overall growth.

I believe the changes in the PSLE system, the DSA review and the OE programmes are critical to preparing our children for the future. These changes will contribute to reducing the emphasis on exam results and give more time and opportunities for every student to develop as a well-rounded individual. However, there is no easy solution, no silver bullet, to the issues of stress and competition that Members raised.

I started out saying that education is both a personal journey as well as a societal concern. Hence, while MOE can change policies and structures, ultimately, this is a personal journey for every child, parent and family. It is a partnership among MOE, educators, students, parents and even employers. Collectively, our choices will determine whether we can succeed in making this paradigm shift to free up time and space for holistic education.

So, let us make this journey together. Let us help our children to make good use of their time to branch out to explore other interests and passions and to pursue what they want to do in life. Let us help them to make good choices about their educational and career pathways based on their aptitudes and aspirations. Let us help them to be ready for the future. This, indeed, will be the best gift that we can present to our next generation. [Applause.]

The Minister of State for Education (Dr Janil Puthucheary): Mdm Chair, an inclusive education system is one where every child is challenged to their full potential and given every opportunity to develop their talents and abilities. To make this a reality, some children need more help. We cannot treat every child in exactly the same manner.

Some children have special needs, some have learning difficulties and others come from less-privileged backgrounds. To achieve equality of opportunity and bring out the best in all of them, we need to treat each child differently. More needs to be done for certain groups of students who need our attention the most. This will appear as an unequal distribution of time, effort and resources.

An inclusive education system has to start in the child's early years. This is when children develop literacy, numeracy, socio-emotional skills and a sense of curiosity and wonder. These are important foundations for all. But we need to recognise that we should not be over-preparing our children for primary school.

Dr Intan Mokhtar has pointed out that we have already achieved almost universal access to preschool. We recognise that having some parental choice and involvement in the type of experience a child has at preschool is important. Our current system allows for this, and compulsory education for preschool may not be the best way forward. Nevertheless, the Government will continue to explore ways to provide every child the opportunity to benefit from a structured preschool experience. For instance, a new pilot programme, KidSTART, will be established to encourage preschool participation at younger ages for children in vulnerable families. MSF will provide more details.

Dr Lim Wee Kiak and Mr Zainal Sapari asked about early childhood education. We have and will continue to invest substantial resources in improving preschool education. Our 15 MKs currently enrol about 1,700 children. The first batch of MK children is now in Primary 1, and parents have shared that their children have the confidence and social skills to adapt well to primary school.

MOE will continue to engage partners and stakeholders in the early childhood education sector to see how we can best use the lessons learned from the MK programme to help all children. Since 2014, we have been sharing good teaching and learning practices at various platforms, including the annual MOE Mother Tongue Language Symposium and the annual Early Childhood Development Agency (ECDA) Early Childhood conference.

From this year, we will be sharing teaching and learning resources we call "Big Books". They are quite large books, for English and Mother Tongue languages, large in font and format, not necessarily very thick. These "Big Books" have been piloted at our MKs. The teachers can use these "Big Books" as a structured approach towards language-learning. This will help more preschool children to speak and read in English and their Mother Tongues with confidence.

In line with our belief that we need to do more for those who need it, additional help is given to those with weak foundations in language and literacy. We have done this through a programme called Focused Language Assistance in Reading (FLAiR) for K2 children in about 360 preschool centres run by anchor operators and MKs. FLAiR has benefited around 17,400 children since 2007, helping them to build a strong foundation in English and narrow the reading gap with their peers.

This programme is especially important if you come from a background or a family that does not have English as a common language at home. English literacy becomes a foundation for studying a wide variety of other subjects – Science and Mathematics, for example, for assessing knowledge on your own in a library and for achieving the sort of self-directed learning that you need to access knowledge on the Internet. So, the FLAiR programme is available as an additional support for all children who need it.

We want to replicate and extend FLAiR's success by increasing the number of anchor operator-run preschool centres offering FLAiR, and it has now been made available to not-for-profit centres. Over 50 such centres are offering FLAiR this year, benefiting about 450 children. We intend to reach out to even more children by doubling the number of not-for-profit centres offering FLAiR over the next few years.

I agree with Ms Denise Phua about the need to level the playing field for all children, regardless of their backgrounds. We ensure that education is heavily subsidised for all students at all levels, and we provide additional financial assistance for needy students.

The provision of technology can also be a social leveller. We give all our schools the resources to provide their students, including the underprivileged ones, with access to computing devices for learning. The online learning space that Ms Denise Phua spoke about, we will take this a step further by giving all students access to self-paced learning anytime and anywhere. This also allows teachers to design lessons and upload them and share work among students. This will also make possible the provision of third-party applications and education ware, including open-source applications. These can be developed separately, to be integrated for use by both teachers and students.

Miss Cheng Li Hui will be pleased to note that we also guide our students to be responsible and safe online. All our schools teach cyber wellness and also appoint students as "Cyber Wellness Student Ambassadors" to help guide their fellow students. Our ITE, polytechnics and autonomous universities also teach cyber wellness in a number of ways, including guidelines, compulsory modules, orientation camps and online platforms.

During and after school hours, we aim to provide a supportive environment for all children, especially those from less-privileged backgrounds. The four Self-Help Groups have come together to form a joint venture which operates six school-based Student Care Centres and will open up another four Student Care Centres in schools by this year.

MOE has supported the establishment of these school-based Student Care Centres (SCCs) that provide after-school care, supervision and development. The number of SCCs has risen from less than 50 four years ago to 130 today, now benefiting 15,000 students. To continue to cater for more students, we will increase the number of school-based SCCs to 140 by the end of this year, with all primary schools having SCCs by 2020.

Promoting health is another way we can provide support for our students. I would like to assure Mr Chen Show Mao that our school canteen stalls comply with HPB guidelines that stipulate the need for healthier ingredients in food preparation and also stipulate a cap on sugar content in beverages.

Equipping children with social and emotional competencies help to increase their mental well-being, reduce risky behaviours and improve academic outcomes. Mr Kok Heung Leun will be pleased to know that social and emotional competencies have been included in the school curriculum a decade ago and are also incorporated with the revised CCE curriculum. Students go through the process of acquiring the skills to recognise and manage emotions, develop care and concern for others, make responsible decisions, establish positive relationships and handle challenging situations.

I would also like to reassure Mr Kok that teachers do use stories of loss, stories of managing change in family circumstances, from Literature as well as from the media to reinforce these lessons and, particularly, to highlight the need for resilience and to develop the mental and social skills in order for the children to have resilience. These values and socio-emotional competencies are reinforced during CCAs and camps. The CCE curriculum also aims to inculcate other 21st century competencies, such as civic literacy and critical thinking.

Many teachers whom I have met feel that this is a central part of their duty. They have a moral obligation to not just be educators but also provide a degree of care and social support for the students they are in charge of looking after. Away from the public eye, there are many circumstances that I have come across in my previous professional life where it was the teacher who demonstrated a very deep understanding of some of the traumas that an underprivileged or vulnerable child may go through and was able to support both the child as well as the family that they were in touch with.

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All teachers are equipped with the skills and knowledge to help our students develop character and the kind of competencies that Mr Kok spoke about. They have to take a CCE module during their pre-service training, which also includes opportunities for them to engage in dialogue with experienced CCE teachers. In addition, all teachers have to take on Service Learning Projects to prepare them to conduct VIA programmes in schools. These two modules, these two ideas of a CCE module and Service Learning Project, in the teacher training process informs us on how we map some of our expectations of behaviours and values that we have of our students to the process that the teachers undergo in their training. So, what we expect in terms of values and behaviours for our students inside our curriculum and in our schools are expressed through the expectations we have of our trainee teachers while they are being trained to be teachers. There is a very tight link between the two.

To address Mr Png Eng Huat's concerns, these VIA programmes are central to our aim of developing a strong civic consciousness. Students learn to take responsibility for their own spaces in class and at home at the primary school level, before progressing to initiating collective action among their peers to improve the lives of others in school and the community at the secondary school level and beyond.

This year, we have reinforced being responsible for the community in a very tangible and physical way. All primary school students play a part in cleaning their schools every day − learning good habits, good values, respecting their school environment and the people who work to keep their schools clean.

Mdm Chair, if I could return to the principles I stated at the beginning, our philosophy of developing inclusivity by giving more support where it is needed most is clearest in our efforts for children with special educational needs.

I would, first, like to assure Dr Intan Mokhtar that the majority of these children, who have relatively mild special educational needs, are already in mainstream schools. We, at MOE, and many of their families believe that these children can cope with the rigours of a mainstream curriculum once they are given a little extra support. Every primary school and 81 secondary schools are now resourced with at least one AED(LBS), as has been pointed out. MOE will continue to recruit more going forward. We do wish to recruit more going forward and extend the availability of this service. But they are doing an important and challenging job. We have to recruit the right people with the right disposition and skills.

We have invested heavily in training both teachers and AEDs(LBS). As Ms Chia Yong Yong has pointed out, we give our schools the flexibility to source specific programmes to meet local specific needs. But these school-based programmes merely supplement the structured training already provided at NIE, our key training partner. All teachers, during their pre-service training, are equipped with an awareness of special educational needs.

NIE also conducts in-service training, covering disability-specific areas, leading to a Certificate in Special Needs Support. AEDs(LBS) undergo the full-time pre-service Diploma in Special Education. The Advanced Diploma in Special Education is also available to them. We work with the Dyslexia Association of Singapore and the Autism Resource Centre to provide these AEDs(LBS) staff with in-service training. As we are committed to training teachers and the allied educators well, we will continue to review the structured training available to them.

MOE has also made available the School-based Dyslexia Remediation (SDR) programme, a specialised intervention programme, to all primary schools from this year. This helps students with dyslexia to overcome their core difficulties in reading and spelling. As part of the programme, we have also developed resources to enable parents to help their children at home to overcome the challenge of dyslexia.

More students with special educational needs are entering our IHLs. More than 1,400 students have sought assistance at the SEN Support Offices, available in every IHL since their establishment. This is almost triple the number who sought assistance as of February 2015. Rather than be concerned about the average disbursements or a particular target, what is important is that these students have access to resources matched to their needs. The needs are greatly varied. Some students need a very small intervention, such as a ramp or a mechanical keyboard, whereas other students need a very wide series of both physical as well as process interventions. So, the average may not be very meaningful. To give an idea, about 90 students, since 2014, have been assisted by the Special Education Fund for the purchase of assistive technology devices and support services. About a quarter of a million dollars has been disbursed to them.

For the smaller group of students with more severe special educational needs, we believe that they are better catered for in Special Education (SPED) schools. These schools are provided substantial funding by MOE – significantly more than the mainstream schools – which goes towards paying specialised staff and providing more intensive support for their students.

We have worked closely with SPED schools to provide a quality education and to help prepare the children for life after school. To cite just one example, we have piloted the School-to-Work Transition Programme in five SPED schools with MSF and SGEnable so that more students can be gainfully employed upon graduation. We identify these students' interests and strengths and put in place structured internships and customised training pathways, with support from job coaches in various organisations. Most of the participants from the first cohort are now successfully employed in a wide range of industries.

The School-to-Work programme will be made available to more SPED schools. MOE is working with interested schools to put in place new processes to enable them to identify and support their students. As we look to improve the transition from school to work, a consistent challenge is the mindset of employers and co-workers. This will take time to change and I urge all Singaporeans to keep an open mind, to offer these students and the adults they grow into every chance to be part of our society.

Ms Denise Phua suggested co-locating SPED schools and mainstream schools to promote inclusivity. To some extent, this is already happening. We need a range of inclusive practices to cater to a range of different needs and allow for meaningful interaction and integration. Our satellite partnership model includes this range of practices. Some SPED schools practise "social integration" with their mainstream partners. Others, like Pathlight School, allow their students to join their mainstream peers in class. Canossian School practises "full inclusion" and its students already join in mainstream classes for all academic and non-academic activities.

In addressing Mr Zainal Sapari's concerns regarding SPED schools, I would like to point out that the majority of SPED schools – 13 out of the 20 schools – charge around $10 to $20 per month. This is comparable to fees at Government schools. The remaining seven SPED schools charge higher fees. This is because they cater to students with multiple disabilities and challenges, who have a greater need for additional educational and therapy support. Nonetheless, their fees are still significantly lower than private SPED schools or international schools. In addition, MOE provides help for needy families through the SPED Financial Assistance Scheme. These schools also offer fee subsidies for eligible students. We will continue to work with SPED schools to improve their affordability.

Over the years, we have been upgrading school premises, setting up new schools and expanding existing ones to allow more students to access special education. In the past few years, we have built a new campus for Delta Senior School, expanded Metta School and created additional classrooms for Pathlight School.

More than physical capacity, skilled, committed and passionate staff are at the heart of our efforts to support children in SPED schools. Just last year, we made available more funds for SPED schools to increase the salaries of teachers, allied professionals and other staff. This is not only to help schools attract and retain personnel, but also to recognise the crucial and challenging work they do every day.

Madam, I have visited a number of SPED schools, including, most recently, AWWA School. Speaking to everybody in all the schools − the members of the board, the education and therapy staff, the nurse who mans the medical bay − you get a very pervasive sense of mission, purpose, pride and professionalism. They explain how much they are devoted to this calling that they have, the work that they do and the students that they care for. But from the outside, it does not look so much like just a job or the professional pride in their job; it looks like love. They love their work. They love their cause and their mission. They love the institutions that they have supported and worked for, raised funds for and volunteered for. They love their students. Sometimes, the students are challenging. Some of the staff get injured. There are problems with the physicality of their work, but it does not stop them. They go back to it. They love what they do and they love their students.

Voluntary welfare organisations should continue to play a key role in SPED. Over the years, they have built up a deep expertise in catering to specific disability types. Each has created, nurtured and supported a specific community of educators, therapists, families and focused on a particular group of children and their challenges. This is a model of shared responsibility between the Government and the community. MOE will continue to support these groups, schools, children and professionals to do what they do so well.

Mdm Chair, let me affirm MOE's commitment to building an inclusive education system in an inclusive society. We will continue to invest the necessary resources to enable all children, regardless of their starting points, to reach their full potential.

SkillsFuture and Lifelong Learning

Ms Foo Mee Har (West Coast): Mdm Chair, SkillsFuture has great potential to help Singaporeans develop new capabilities and achieve their fullest potential. If implemented effectively, it will sustain Singapore's competitive advantage and help our people get good jobs and have fulfilling careers. This is especially critical at a time when many workers have to keep pace with rapid technological changes whilst others, affected by economic restructuring, have to be reskilled, possibly multiple times, throughout their working life.

SkillsFuture can provide that lifeline for Singaporeans to ride the waves of change, rather than be dragged down and crushed by disruptive forces in the marketplace. I, therefore, applaud the Government for this visionary initiative. It is a significant investment in our people, costing S$1 billion a year for the next few years, and we must fully capitalise on it.

Madam, I would like to start by highlighting some feedback from my constituents on aspects of the SkillsFuture system that need to be addressed for it to really work for us. The current system is more useful to workers who know what they want to do, but less helpful to those who are thinking about a career change or who have been made redundant. The system does not lay out a clear path to build new skills for new careers. There must be clear linkages from training courses, to skills, to jobs. And I repeat: there must be clear linkages from training courses, to skills, to jobs.

Equally important is the information on industry growth clusters where vacancies exist and where future jobs will flourish. There should be a simple tool to help people narrow down their options, to focus their efforts. For a segment of the less-educated older Singaporeans who will have difficulty going online to search for courses, we must have an alternative ready for them.

To fully leverage SkillsFuture, we should start with better career guidance for school leavers to choose their future vocation well, so that they are well-guided in their choice of post-secondary education. We should learn from the best practices in Switzerland where about two-thirds of 15- to 16-year-old students leave school to start their vocational training. Before leaving school, students should have the opportunity to have "look-see" experiences at vocations that may interest them, carried out in a very systematic way, whether they are curious about being a doctor, a chef or a computer programmer. Companies and trade associations should work with MOE to conduct "open house" exercises to provide insights to jobs, working environments and career prospects in their industry.

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Madam, I was happy to hear Acting Minister Ng Chee Meng speaking about nurturing interests and passion in students in his speech. I have received many appeals from young people who are disappointed that they have missed the entrance marks to the study of their choice despite a very clear interest and passion for their area of study. Therefore, I would like to appeal that IHLs consider providing places to prospective students who have demonstrated a passion for the field of study they are applying for, in addition to being assessed purely on academic results. Madam, mastery can only be nurtured starting with a passion.

Presently, the most urgent need for SkillsFuture is to really help the retrenched professionals find their feet, rebuild confidence, guide them to acquire new skills and, more importantly, find ways to get employers on board to provide job opportunities. There must be significantly more effort invested on "place and train". The connection between training and employability must be more direct and stronger, so as to provide a line of sight between the efforts that one puts into retraining and the hope for re-employment. Displaced professionals, managers and executives (PMEs) should also be supported through "mid-career" Earn and Learn Programmes, so that, for "senior interns", there is a "bridge" to permanent jobs. And I fully support initiatives, such as TechSkills Accelerator, and would like to ask the Acting Minister when similar programmes will be launched for other sectors.

SkillsFuture will only succeed with careful planning and coordination amongst all key stakeholders – individuals, employers and the Government − to ensure the right set of outcomes. The Government's active involvement should in no way diminish the employers' critical role in training and developing their employees. So, I would like to ask the Acting Minister how companies are complementing the efforts of SkillsFuture to develop their staff, including the provision of annual leave.

SkillsFuture

Mr Ang Wei Neng (Jurong): Mdm Chair, many hon Members have praised the importance of SkillsFuture and its significance for the survival of Singapore. At the same time, we also need to develop a system to ensure that the courses eligible for SkillsFuture credits are of acceptable quality. I agree on all these three counts.

I would like to raise two suggestions. While SkillsFuture caters mainly to working adults who want to upgrade their skills so that they are still relevant in the job market, it also caters to elderly Singaporeans who want to upgrade themselves in their golden years. Thus, it would be good if the course directory of SkillsFuture can include a section that consolidates courses which are more suitable for retired adults.

For that matter, I would like to seek clarification with the Acting Minister for Education Mr Ong Ye Kung whether there is an upper age limit for them to claim their SkillsFuture credit entitlement. If there is no age limit, could Singaporeans who have passed on transfer their SkillsFuture credits to their loved ones?

For SkillsFuture to be inclusive, I hope that the Workforce Development Agency (WDA) and other Government agencies could devote some time developing suitable courses for persons with disability or make provisions for some of the existing courses to be friendly for persons with disability to attend. If this suggestion is acceptable to the Acting Minister, the SkillsFuture course directory could also include a section dedicated to persons with disability to reflect the focus in this area.

Assoc Prof Randolph Tan (Nominated Member): Mdm Chair, I declare my interest as an employee of Singapore University of Management University (UniSIM), a private university dedicated to lifelong learning. UniSIM has a large enrolment of working adults and is involved in the provision of SkillsFuture courses.

As the Minister for Finance has emphasised, providing good jobs is a priority. It is also important to ensure that workers with the right skills are available to take such jobs. A prolonged shortage of workers with the requisite skills will, ultimately, put the job creation process under intense pressure. If the supply of workers with the right skill sets is not forthcoming, job creation will have to adjust to the realities of labour supply. For decades, our labour market policy had been able to address this challenge, supported by intricate planning from MOE.

However, technological disruption and increasingly intense global economic competition threaten to catch us unprepared. With skill obsolescence being one of the most severe long-term threats, SkillsFuture promises to be a sustained long-term effort that can confront these problems.

One of the main challenges with the shift in emphasis to long-term programmes, such as SkillsFuture, is how to sustain interest and effort, and how to balance accountability while allowing for scope for individuals to take control of their self-directed learning needs. It is not easy to predict the impact of SkillsFuture on individual organisations, including education institutions like mine. Will the emphasis on acquiring skills lead to a reduction of emphasis on achieving qualifications? Regardless of whether it does, what will happen to institutions which do not promote skills-based learning? Some will be caught unprepared, while others will be much more prepared and come out well. Individuals will not be spared from the consequences of being caught unprepared.

But how does one prepare for SkillsFuture and what does it mean to be prepared? To begin with, I think we should look at SkillsFuture as a journey, one in which we must be prepared for the long haul, pace ourselves and not deplete our resources, including our enthusiasm, too quickly, and ensure we reach the destination that matches our individual objectives. Learning journeys for working adults often take place against a backdrop of individual and family sacrifices, unlike full-time students with neither dependants nor work responsibilities, the most mundane aspects present challenges for adult learners.

This can range from what time they should leave work to navigate rush-hour traffic in order not to be late for lectures, to whether family time or home work should take priority over a weekend. Working adults who take night classes experience such difficulties more than others, without any recognition and little understanding of their circumstances.

The most important difference between learning for skills and learning for qualifications is that the former should be a perpetual ongoing process, unlike the latter, where each stage, as well as an endpoint, are clearly and uniformly demarcated for entire cohorts, and the achievement of qualifications is accompanied by awards, celebration and the shelving of course material.

Acquiring skills can also be accompanied by dirt and grime. The providers of Earn and Learn placements reveal the reality of the job environment without flashy trappings, comfortable surroundings and swanky privileges. They end up with few or no takers. Artificially jazzing up everything just to attract interest risks misrepresenting the facts about what lies ahead for SkillsFuture aspirants.

The mindset with which both individuals and organisations embrace their SkillsFuture journey is, therefore, important. Perhaps, one of the most important hurdles I foresee is the way SkillsFuture aspirants perceive themselves. This issue may have an impact on how deep the effort goes in effecting real change in our workforce. The Government has done its part, but how will it sustain its effort for the long term without getting caught up in superficial indicators of performance?

As taxpayers' funds are involved, accountability and appropriate measures of performance of all programmes mounted under the SkillsFuture initiative are needed. However, this has to be balanced against an overly heavy focus on chasing KPIs. We should be careful not to lose sight of the length of the SkillsFuture journey and the rigours to be endured by those who embark upon it.

How do we balance these two − the need for accountability and the desire to allow each individual enough room to learn at a pace to fit their needs?

In addition, how do we balance the long-term goals with the short-term need for accountability? Acquiring skills on the job is quite different from acquiring knowledge in the classroom. In classroom-based learning, experimentation and trial-and-error are positively encouraged. There is little doubt that employers would want their workers to deepen their skills on the job. Yet, while both experimentation and trial-and-error are inevitable in a workplace setting, they are meant to be incidental. Performing the task at hand correctly each time is the priority in a workplace setting. Even as the physical boundaries of the classroom become blurred, such distinctions would have to be appreciated in order for stakeholders to keep faith in one another and remain committed to the SkillsFuture journey.

Mdm Chair, in conclusion, how do we promote depth in skills acquisition without dampening the enthusiasm for exploring hobbies and interests? Would the Ministry consider using SkillsFuture top-ups for this purpose, such as by linking the amount of top-ups to whether skills that had been acquired match the progression in skills levels in a particular area?

Miss Cheng Li Hui: SkillsFuture courses are very diverse, from Aerospace to Domestic Cleaning, Marine and Port Services to Tourism. With such a wide range of subjects and with so many different providers, how does the Ministry ensure the quality of the courses and their relevance to market needs? I am interested to know what are the checks and mechanisms in place to maintain consistent standards and encourage providers to keep their content updated and relevant.

What are also some measures that will be put in place to prevent potential abuse of the schemes by the vendors? Would the Ministry also share how often audits will be conducted on training providers and their companies?

I also tried checking up the various types of approved courses on the website and it is actually not quite friendly. I would like to request for the design of the SkillsFuture website to be more informative and user-friendly. In addition, can there also be a platform for interested learners to exchange information and feedback about the courses with past participants and the vendors?

Ms Chia Yong Yong: Madam, the Government has been progressive and flexible in the implementation of SkillsFuture for all Singaporeans, including seniors and persons with disabilities.

As we continue to expand and deepen SkillsFuture, I hope we will continue to extend reasonable accommodation to seniors and persons with disabilities to enable them to secure job opportunities and attain career progression. As such, I would like to know whether training providers will be required to grant reasonable accommodation to these groups of trainees and make their training facilities and venues accessible to them.

In addition, I would like to bring to the attention of the House a group of special students. They have disabilities, and are mostly attending SPED schools. This group of students will finish school at a much later age than their peers. And, unlike their peers, they will require longer training pathways to acquire vocational skills for employment. I would urge the Government to consider making SkillsFuture credit available to this group of students at an earlier age to support them during the training pathways prior to employment.

SkillsFuture Uptake and Expansion

Mr Baey Yam Keng (Tampines): Mdm Chair, I commend the Government for the introduction of SkillsFuture. It is a significant commitment in Singapore's next phase of people development. The success of SkillsFuture lies in building a culture of lifelong learning. Each individual must have an intrinsic motivation to identify his areas of interests and pursue them to achieve deeper skills mastery.

So, I was heartened by the introduction of the SkillsFuture Credit earlier this year. This will empower everyone to chart and embark upon his or her own lifelong learning journey. I have received several initial positive feedback on the SkillsFuture Credit from residents and others. Some are still thinking about how they should use their credits, but a few others have already started to explore courses that they would not have had taken otherwise. This, I think, is a good development, as it spurs individuals to start thinking about their own learning journeys.

Last month, I opened an exhibition by the first batch of SkillsFuture students who completed a course in Digital Photography Technology and Techniques at UniSIM.

The students came from all walks of life. There was a freelance photographer who said that the course has enhanced his skills. Another student, who is a corporate trainer, told me that with better photography skills, he could make his teaching materials more interesting.

I have requests from senior citizens to transfer their SkillsFuture credits into their MediSave or their children's SkillsFuture account, as they could not find a suitable course. Some said that they are already in their 70s or 80s; what more can they learn or should they learn?

To be fully effective, the list of courses eligible for the SkillsFuture Credit should cater to a broader range of interests. On that note, I would like to ask MOE what are the additional or new types of SkillsFuture courses that will be open for Singaporeans, including seniors, because only then can we truly promote lifelong learning. I would also like to ask the Minister on the uptake of this programme thus far, including the profile of Singaporeans who have utilised their SkillsFuture credits.

SkillsFuture and Private Education Institutions

Mr Gan Thiam Poh (Ang Mo Kio): Mdm Chair, recently, there have been some issues with privately-run education institutions. The Council for Private Education (CPE), which is responsible for regulating our private education sector, has the challenging task of ensuring the quality of these schools. As of last year, only 57 of the approximately 300 private schools hold the four-year EduTrust quality mark.

Many more courses in diverse fields will be offered under SkillsFuture. If CPE's experience can be used as a benchmark, it will be challenging to "patrol" so many programmes. In addition to setting up accreditation frameworks, we need regular enforcement to ensure the rigour and quality of the courses. How can we ensure that prospective students are enrolling in reliable and relevant programmes?

Next Steps for SkillsFuture

Mr Desmond Choo (Tampines): Mdm Chair, many Singaporeans are excited by SkillsFuture, but some have concerns about how they can use their SkillsFuture credits meaningfully. The ones who know what they want to do already have a particular field and specific courses in mind.

However, they might not be sure what progression the course will lead to. Then there are those who are overwhelmed by the sheer number of courses, of which some can be rather similar-sounding. This group may end up spending their SkillsFuture credits randomly. The third group might not have the information technology (IT) literacy skills to trawl through the directory of courses. Can the Ministry share on the SkillsFuture credit utilisation rate by demographics to date? Are progressive utilisation targets useful to gauge the success of SkillsFuture credit? If not, what would be better progress tracking metrics?

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Our Singaporeans might need guidance to spend the credit wisely. I would like to suggest that the Government provide "course curation" for more informed selection, for example, in an Amazon recommended reading list manner. In an Amazon-style course curation system, users will be able to get course suggestions based on their training preferences and peer reviews. It also ensures that course providers constantly upgrade and innovate to cater to industry's and users' demand. Can the Ministry create platforms for peer reviews to be shared publicly to differentiate the quality of courses and guide Singaporeans better? How can the Ministry help Singaporeans to navigate the training terrain better?

For workers to deep-skill and traverse industries, they can be provided with sectoral-based pathways and skills ladders linked to training courses in the SkillsFuture directory. I would like to ask the Minister how many skills ladders have been developed to date and how many more industries with defined skills ladders can we expect this year?

These skills and competencies should also be mapped to economic and manpower needs to optimise manpower usage. The Sectoral Tripartite Committees have been developing their sectoral manpower plans (SMPs) to do so. How many SMPs have been developed? Do they seek to feature the courses in the said directory?

SkillsFuture should also be about providing workers with options to secure their future and livelihood. For example, many residents questioned why Class 3 Driving Licence is not included even though it can lead to many driving-based jobs or enhance their employability? To many lower-income workers, it secures livelihoods in the event of retrenchment. In comparison, for example, floral arrangement, which is in the course directory, is interesting and can be a useful skill. But it might not lead to the immediate broader array of opportunities from a Class 3 driving licence. What is the current set of criteria in making a course SkillsFuture credit-eligible? Can we include more employability-related courses to be eligible for SkillsFuture credit?

Include Life Coaching Under SkillsFuture

Mr Ang Hin Kee (Ang Mo Kio): Mdm Chair, I welcome the news that SkillsFuture credit will be strengthened with more training programmes being added into the course directory. The stepping up of the Professional Conversion Programmes (PCP) will also help more Singaporeans adapt, grow their skills and find a new career path.

However, I have also received feedback that the sheer number and wide-ranging choices can be overwhelming for an individual to choose from. Some may just jump into the training bandwagon and sign on courses without giving adequate thought about the areas they really need to invest in. Others may follow in the footsteps of their friends or peers or succumb to the persuasions of advertisements.

To enhance their decision making, I would like to propose that individuals be allowed to use their SkillsFuture Credit to attend sessions conducted by professional life coaches. Typically, life coaching sessions allow attendees to set clear goals, assess their current realities, run through options and determine the next best step forward.

The concept of life coaching is still quite new in Singapore, but it is gaining popularity amongst working adults. Will the Ministry consider including life coaching under the SkillsFuture credit course directory? Coaching format can also be in a group setting besides the usual one-to-one sessions.

With SkillsFuture, we want to empower our workers with skills mastery and inculcate a lifelong learning attitude. Through a life coach, I believe that workers can do constant checks and reviews on their skills gaps, career goals and pathways of growth. This is a bold new area but also a pre-emptive effort to prepare our workers to be in control of the career of their life and to be future-ready, instead of seeking help only when a problem arises or when they get retrenched.

I urge the Ministry to consider trying this unexplored area to help our workers take ownership of their careers and personal growth, to be fully aware of what their goals and aspirations are, and have the right drive and motivation to move towards realising them.

Education and Career Guidance

Mr Baey Yam Keng: Mdm Chair, I would like to speak for parents of children who increasingly seek advice on education and career, as well as for those who have chosen to answer the call to be an education and career guidance (ECG) counsellor.

Students, and their parents, are naturally anxious about their future. We know that some students feel pressured to consider popular jobs or pathways that may actually not be suited to their strengths. Some may not know what is available and others may simply want a second opinion. So, they look to the experts, or ECG counsellors, for assistance.

ECG counsellors are vested with heavy responsibility, and yet they are only human. Many are former educators or industry professionals.

Already, it is no easy job to have at one's fingertips knowledge about the education system. It is harder still to imagine that ECG counsellors would have come into their role with knowledge about all kinds of jobs. There are new jobs in emerging fields, and existing jobs are constantly evolving. Even industry experts find it challenging to predict what jobs will continue to exist, how they will change, how pay levels will evolve, and the whims of demand and supply.

When I was a young boy, my ambition was to be a teacher. I conducted lessons for my two younger brothers and made them do homework. However, I do not think I did so then because I had a lofty desire to nurture the younger generation, probably more to lord over my siblings. Looking back, I had wanted to be a teacher then simply because it was the only job I knew. As a child or even teenager, our exposure was limited. That is where ECG counsellors help to fill the gap.

Yet, students and parents need to be assured that the ECG counsellors have adequate and updated knowledge to provide good advice.

My question for MOE is: "How can we ensure that ECG counsellors stay knowledgeable and updated on what is happening in industries, so that they provide good education and career guidance to students?"

The Chairman: Mr Seah Kian Peng, you have two cuts. Please take them together.

Singaporean Core in University Faculties

Mr Seah Kian Peng: Mdm Chair, it is no mean feat for a Singapore university to emerge as the top one in Asia and 12th in the world. In the latest international rankings, we are placed higher than Yale.

That partly comes from the willingness of our universities to attract overseas students and academics of calibre. This is part of our national psyche – we are an international island open to trade and global talent. However, we are a nation, first and foremost, a home for our people and a place where our children need to find their own footing, voice and identity.

In all of this, our places of higher education play a crucial role.

The percentage of Singaporean university academics in some departments, such as Political Science, and Communications and Public Policy, hovers from a quarter to less than half in 2014; that percentage is unlikely to change at current state.

On the supply side, it could be that the pool of Singapore Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) students applying for an academic position locally is very small. It could be that many already have offers from the international job market and the 11 universities that are ranked higher than us. It could be that they are paid so much overseas that they prefer to teach elsewhere than in Singapore. It could be; but I do not think so.

The Minister has visited many IHLs, both in Singapore and abroad. I would like to ask him: in his most recent visit to a national university, how many Singaporean professors did he meet? How many international faculties? Does he think this is proportionate in a national university?

Second, I would like to ask what is the percentage of local professors in national universities in the US, UK and Australia. I have raised this in Parliament in the past and was told that we do not have the numbers. I would not be surprised if we still do not have them. There is no way better to ensure that a man does not know something when his job depends on his not knowing it.

Whatever the international figures, however, I think the current situation where the global talent outnumbers local ones in key departments, like the ones I have just mentioned, is less than ideal.

Can I ask the Minister for an update on the figures, what he thinks about them and what he intends to do? I am not saying that we ought to hire Singaporeans only or even for any sort of nationalistic affirmative action policy, but merely to see if we can put local professors on a more equal footing.

University Ranking

Next, I wish to express my reservation about university rankings. Rankings, be it Quacquarelli Symonds or Times Higher Education, may be construed as useful in many ways, and it is precisely these many ways of interpretations from different interest groups that I would like to ask the Minister what these agencies really measure and, for that matter, how they reflect our national priorities.

The methodologies used to construct these rankings change, too, and we are not sure whether the climb upwards is because we are getting better or we are hitching a ride on changed methodologies or, worse, that we are restructuring ourselves so that we become more attractive to the people compiling these rankings. Can the Minister tell us if the climb up the rankings factors in the KPIs of key administrators and what other considerations are taken into account?

Private Universities in Singapore

Mr Ang Wei Neng: Mdm Chair, since the launch of the Global Schoolhouse initiative in 2002, many private universities were established in Singapore to attract international and local students. A few years ago, there were some consolidations in the private education industry sector. Could the Minister share the number of private educational institutions in Singapore that offer undergraduate courses between 2000 and 2015 as well as the number of undergraduates who have enrolled in these institutions each year and how many of them are Singaporeans, Singapore Permanent Residents and foreigners?

As the Government pushes the cohort participation rate of Singaporeans being offered a place in the six public universities to 40%, would MOE be reviewing the roles, capacity provisions and quality of private education, in particular, private universities, in Singapore?

Singapore is an Asian society. Most parents would like their children to obtain a university degree. If the private universities are maintaining the current provision of university places for Singaporeans as the six public universities are ramping up their enrolment figures, there is a genuine concern that the quality of Singapore students enrolling at these private universities will drop. At the same time, the supply of graduates will also increase significantly and we may run into the same problem faced by Taiwan and South Korea where more than 70% of each cohort is a university graduate. Many graduates from the private universities may then be underemployed. This will cause much angst to the graduates as well as their parents who have to fork out tens of thousands of dollars to pay for the tuition fees.

Thus, we hope that MOE will tighten the framework that governs the quality of private universities, making it more transparent to prospective students and their parents the probable employment outcome of their graduates. At the same time, MOE could also encourage private universities to shift their focus and run courses geared towards lifelong learning under the SkillsFuture initiatives.

The Acting Minister for Education (Higher Education and Skills) (Mr Ong Ye Kung): Mdm Chair, I am still having a cough and will try my best. But let me, first, start by addressing the current worry that Ms Foo Mee Har has raised. I chair the subcommittee on jobs and skills of CFE. So, I met an old friend recently. He is a journalist and I asked him what his readers expect out of the sub-committee. And he said, "The economy is a bit sluggish, tell the students and the parents what to study, and after that what jobs to get. You used to say it!" And when he said "you", he meant the Government. The Government used to say, study chemical engineering, biomed. And so, what is next?

When I see young students today, some of them ask me the same question. There are two answers to this question, from two opposite, yet related, perspectives.

The first perspective, the first answer, is to understand the environment. It is very frustrating for a young person to graduate with a degree or diploma, step out into the workforce and find that there is no demand. Very frustrating. Something Mr Ang Wei Neng just mentioned, it happens in Korea, it happens in Taiwan. We must know how economic winds are blowing domestically, in the region, in the world and what is developing, what are the technological advancements. What skills and knowledge are in demand? We should never ignore demand. From this perspective, governments all have a duty to decipher all that is happening around us and signal to the people what are the areas to pursue.

The second answer is to know the individual. If we can help every one of us discover our interests and aspirations, uncover innate talents and abilities and fulfil the potential of as many individuals as possible, that will become an enduring strength for the collective, for Singapore. From this perspective, what to learn is also a very personal enterprise; we must help each individual follow their respective rainbows.

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I will start with the first answer – understand the environment. While the global economy is sluggish, there are still opportunities. It is the case for every slowdown and recession. Let me just name a few here.

First, cybersecurity and data analytics are growth areas. They are driven by the proliferation of the Internet of Things and our Smart Nation initiative. One major telecoms company told me that they alone need 3,000 cyber security specialists. And we all know that the Infocomm Development Authority's (IDA's) Infocomm Manpower Survey projected about 15,000 more jobs in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector in the coming years.

We also need people to develop and operate public infrastructure, such as the new Changi Airport Terminals 4 and 5, plus new Mass Rapid Transit lines. The Government is ramping up the recruitment of engineers. The Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) is building up its engineering corp, granting engineering scholarships.

To better support parents with young children, we need to expand the early childhood education sector, which needs another 1,500 educators over the next two to three years.

With an ageing population and new hospitals, nursing homes and step-down care centres being built, there will be thousands more job opportunities in the healthcare sector across all levels.

We live in an exciting region with the markets around us presenting tremendous opportunities. If Singapore-based companies can venture out to these markets and successfully tap into them, that will create many, many jobs for our people. But it requires us to be able to go overseas, have boots on the ground and understand those markets.

Ms Foo Mee Har asked about helping PMEs who have lost their jobs to find new ones in such growth sectors. This is something that WDA has set out to do since it was formed in 2003. This effort predates SkillsFuture. And before we had PCP, we had SMCP, Place-and-train (PnT), Attach-and-Train (AnT) and several other schemes. Minister Lim Swee Say will be speaking more on these during his Ministry's COS debate to help the retrenched and the misplaced to find employment again.

Now, the second answer, from the perspective of understanding the individual. In this age of possibilities, we make room for a universe of purposes – encouraging our young people to find meaning in new and unimagined ways, such as new ways to deliver services, entertain the masses, power our industries, protect the environment, protect Singapore, or build machines to do things better and faster.

How Silicon Valley became a crucible for innovation, how the Swiss became a leader in watchmaking, how Singapore became a food haven – these are not plans drawn up by governments. They happened because enough people were interested about something. They congregated and made it happen. It is organic; it is ground-up; it is haphazard.

We have, therefore, embarked on a movement to harness the collective interests and aspirations of our people, develop varied paths for people to develop mastery and go as far as they can, regardless of their starting points. That movement, we call SkillsFuture.

I thank Ms Denise Phua for devoting a good part of her Budget Debate speech to SkillsFuture. We will study her suggestions carefully. But I must first, explain that SkillsFuture is not the $500 Credit granted to individuals, because I have gotten so many cuts on that. The Credit is a small but important part of SkillsFuture. SkillsFuture is much more.

It starts with schools, laying the foundation for our young; and then, higher education, that is, ITEs, polytechnics, universities, take over. These help our young discover their interests and aspirations, impart knowledge to them, hone their skills and prepare them for the real world. From there, a lifelong learning system takes over, where they embark on a continuous journey of learning, updating and even finding a new path.

Along the way, they will persevere, improve and achieve mastery in their chosen fields, and maybe teach the next generation. If they do that, at the individual level, there is a tremendous sense of fulfilment and pride. Collectively, Singapore becomes more competitive and more inclusive in the way we view success and merit. But beneath this learning infrastructure, what underpins SkillsFuture is the personal enterprise of each and every one of us, to learn a lifetime to achieve a mastery, a mastery that is a part of who we are.

Today, I will talk about what MOE is doing in three areas of focus as we move forward on SkillsFuture: first, interests and aspirations; second, developing mastery; and third, innovation.

First, interest and aspirations. If we are learning something we are interested in, we are more likely to stay curious and engaged. If we stay curious, we are likely to make learning that subject a lifetime pursuit. If we make it a lifetime pursuit, we achieve mastery. So, it starts with interest, or a deep sense of purpose and, as Ms Denise Phua said, a yearning for the sea.

That is why we must make a greater effort to help students discover their interests and passions, through ECG. Parliamentary Secretary Low Yen Ling will speak more about this topic.

We then match student interests with their course of study as much as possible during the admissions process. That, I fully agree with Ms Foo Mee Har. Today, the polytechnics and universities are doing this to some extent.

We have an exercise called the Direct Polytechnic Admissions (DPA). Here, students are assessed through a range of measures, like interviews, write-ups and artistic portfolios, which cover not just academic scores but also other strengths, a much more holistic approach. Some secure a place in a polytechnic before they even receive their GCE "O" level results, a little bit like DSA. DPA today covers 2.5% of total admissions at the polytechnic level.

But at the course level, we allow up to 30% of the admission to be based on the applicants' interest and passion in the vocation, on top of their academic scores. Last year, as a pilot, we raised the cap for early childhood education courses from 30% to 50% and it worked well. The universities also have some flexibility to admit up to 10% of students on the basis of their unique strengths and talents. The effort to admit students into their areas of interest has yielded good results.

MOE studies have looked into students with similar GCE "O" level aggregate scores. So, we have a control group, one group brought in through DPA; another group through the normal aggregate scores method, but both with similar GCE "O" level scores. The students who are admitted to the polytechnics via DPA do better in their studies. They have lower drop-out rates and are far more likely to embark on careers in the sectors which they are educated and trained in.

This confirms what had been intuitive to us all along. When you are able to choose and enter a course you are interested in or feel passionate about, you feel more ownership and enthusiasm, and will likely do better. There is a Confucius saying, "知之者不如好之者, 好之者不如乐之者". If I may provide an imperfect translation, it means somebody who knows cannot match somebody who wants to know; somebody who wants to know cannot match somebody who loves or is passionate to know. And we see that happening.

MOE will, therefore, strengthen aptitude-based admissions. At the polytechnics, we will expand the pilot done for early childhood education courses. We started with the early childhood education courses out of necessity, because some of the students do not have staying power in the industry, something that Assoc Prof Randolph Tan mentioned. When you hit the ground, when you see the kids, after a while, you might give up, because you really need to love to interact with kids and have a knack of doing so to be a good professional in the field.

There are many other trades where similar considerations will apply, where interest, aspiration and some innate abilities, play a big part in ensuring that the student enjoys learning the specialised skills and has staying power in the trade. Having said that, not all courses are suitable for aptitude-based admissions, but we can certainly expand the scope we have today.

We will allow a total of 75 courses, or one-third of total polytechnic courses, to admit up to 50% of their students based on more holistic aptitude-based assessments. Some of these courses are baking, culinary, architecture, mass media, sports coaching, nursing, social work, drama and psychology, game design, interior design, digital forensics and so on.

To support more aptitude-based admissions at the course level, we need to raise the DPA allowance at the polytechnic level. We will do so by 10 percentage points, from 2.5% today to 12.5%. We will rename the exercise and call it the Early Admissions Exercise (EAE).

With this change, we will also wind down what we call the Joint Polytechnic Special Admissions Exercise (JPSAE), which covers a small segment of students today applying based on achievements, such as sports or community work. This will be folded into EAE. In the same vein, we will also put in place a new aptitude-based admissions exercise for students progressing from ITE to polytechnics. At the universities, we will increase the aptitude-based admissions intake allowance for NUS, Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Singapore Management University (SMU) from 10% to 15%. The Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) is already a heavy user of such methods.

This is not a simple matter. Allocating places by grades on a single metric – aggregate score – is straightforward and, to many people, fair, transparent and objective. We just compare numbers. But when you introduce other measures of a student's ability, it calls for an exercise of judgement. Between a 12-pointer who is not so interested in a course but does not mind a course, and a 16-pointer who is very interested in the course, who do you choose? This goes beyond making decisions based on one metric, but making a judgement call. This requires wiser minds.

Notwithstanding the changes, every course will still need some minimum academic criteria, so that we have some assurance that the student can cope with the academic rigour of the course and we do not set him up to fail the course. These changes can meet the aptitudes and interests of more students, but not all students. There will be applications that the polytechnics will have to turn down, and I expect many more appeals. And as Members of Parliament, you may expect more appeals. And I fully expect them to quote what I have just said in their appeals.

I was somewhat apprehensive in wanting to make this move. To be honest, I was asking myself: was I opening a can of worms? But I became convinced that this is the right thing to do when I visited the universities and polytechnics and spoke to the senior educators. They all told me this is so much harder to do but, speaking as educators, it is the right thing to do.

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I also spoke with industry leaders, who unequivocally expressed that, today, beyond having people who know stuff, they want students who are passionate about their industry and interested in their industry. So, the changes will be implemented for admissions for Academic Year 2017. We will keep a close watch on how things go and review thereafter.

I want to add a final comment on this topic, which is that, today, while many students have clear interests and pursuits, most are actually unclear about what they want to do. We should not be pushing the young to rush into declaring their interests prematurely. I will be rather upset if I change this policy and then see the sprouting of a new tuition industry teaching students how to ace interviews. That is not the spirit at all.

If a young person has yet to discover his area of interest, the system should give him more time for self-discovery. If he cannot get into the course of study he wants, then I hope he can give what he has a chance. Sometimes, we make the best out of the hand we are dealt with in life.

Creative arts. The creative arts is an area that many young Singaporeans are interested in. We have been working with the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) and LASALLE, our two arts institutions, to provide good pathways for students. I have asked Parliamentary Secretary Muhammad Faishal Ibrahim to take a closer look at this sector to see how our creative arts tertiary education can be further developed.

Private education institutions (PEIs). While we expand the options for higher education, one specific area of concern raised by Mr Gan Thiam Poh and Mr Ang Wei Neng is private education institutions. I share those concerns. Parliamentary Secretary Faishal will speak further on this topic.

The second area of priority is to build mastery. It often takes our whole lives to master something. The SkillsFuture Earn and Learn Programme (ELP) was launched last year, with the objective of opening a pathway for ITE and polytechnic graduates to deepen their skills within their discipline of study. ELP is a dual-track, work-study approach, where students can deepen skills and knowledge in school, while acquiring experience in industries. It is similar to the apprenticeship model of learning in Europe.

In 2015, we rolled out 15 ELPs in 12 sectors. About 150 students were placed in more than 50 companies, of which, about half were small and medium enterprises. The feedback from employers and trainees has been encouraging. We will expand the ELP scheme in two ways.

Today, ITE graduates embarking on ELP obtain a Workforce Skills Qualification Advanced or Higher Certificate. We will introduce a new ELP pathway that will allow ITE graduates to work towards a full, part-time polytechnic diploma. There will be two new ELPs along this pathway in the Air Transport sector. We are also looking into similar ELPs in the Public Transport, ICT and hotels sectors. With this pathway, ITE graduates can take modules that are relevant to their current work first. They can focus on upgrading their skills to do a better job, without rushing to get a paper qualification for its own sake.

In addition, we will introduce another 20 new ELPs, covering 10 additional sectors in accountancy, air transport, electronics, energy and chemicals, facilities management, healthcare, hotel, maritime, spatial design, and visual communication.

This will bring the total number of ELPs to 37, covering 22 sectors.

We will also continue to strengthen the lifelong learning system. Just as learning does not stop after school, the universities' role in education does not stop after students' graduation. All five autonomous universities will be setting up new units dedicated to lifelong learning.

NUS will set up the School of Continuing and Lifelong Education (SCALE). NTU will establish the College of Professional and Continuing Education (PaCE). SMU will set up the Academy of Continuing Education (ACE). So, the way to remember these is: all these will help you PaCE your learning, ACE your skills, and SCALE new heights!

We do not forget the other two. The Singapore University of Technology and Design will also set up its Academy of Technology and Design, and SIT will name its unit SITLearn.

The purpose is not to offer part-time degrees or master's programmes to fuel the paper chase further, but to help workers stay relevant and competitive. A key focus of these centres will be to look beyond traditional degree offerings by offering shorter, bite-sized certificate programmes. So, in response to Assoc Prof Randolph Tan's question, all universities, including research universities, can participate in skills-based learning.

Through these centres, we also hope to underscore an idea pertinent to lifelong learning, which is, after you graduate, the next upgrade need not be a degree, masters or PhD. Often, it is something, in real practical terms, to stay abreast of industry developments and changes in technology, or deepen existing skills.

In IT, this may mean getting a vendor certificate. In aerospace, it may mean getting type-trained for certain aircraft or learning how to deal with composite materials. If you are in the foreign service, it may mean learning a new language.

Ms Foo Mee Har pointed out in her speech that we also need companies and industries to be actively involved in lifelong learning. The best way for companies to contribute is to offer real-life learning that institutions cannot simulate, a point that Assoc Prof Randolph Tan underscored. Even the best graduates cannot be ready for work from day one. They need time to learn about the industry and the company. The partnership between IHLs and industries must, therefore, be an enduring and ever-strengthening one.

In Singapore, we have built up a landscape of private and industry-linked training providers through WDA's work over the years. It has not been an easy process. Whatever we have built up, we have to strengthen.

Today, training providers, such as the SIA Engineering Company's Training Academy, 3dsense Media School, SEED Institute from NTUC and At-Sunrice GlobalChef Academy, provide industry-relevant training which supports both employers, as well as individuals.

In logistics, Dr Robert Yap, Executive Chairman of YCH, is spearheading efforts to set up a supply chain and logistics academy – actually, it is called SCALA, another acronym. Singapore Telecommunications Ltd (SingTel) is planning to start an industry training centre for cyber security. There will always be a place for these private sector providers and industry players in SkillsFuture.

There is, of course, also the SkillsFuture Credit. It is one part of SkillsFuture and it sends a very important message, which is that each of us is in charge of our own pursuit of mastery and learning throughout our lives. This is why only you can use your Credit. We want every Singaporean, young and old, to think about this personal enterprise that cannot be transferred or outsourced to someone else. It is a personal enterprise. So, in response to Mr Ang Wei Neng, while there is no upper age limit for the Credit, the Credit is also not transferrable.

We are at the stage of an evolution where we make every Singaporean think about their personal enterprise. I heard friends who have parents over 80 years old thinking to themselves: what should I learn? And I think that is wonderful.

At this stage, let us get that philosophical message through, rather than add more features into the system and over-administer it. Focus on bringing that philosophical message through. It is for this reason that we have deliberately designed the Credit to be on the generous side. We started with 10,000 eligible courses, not a small number, and included online providers, such as Coursera and Udemy.

If we accept this is a personal enterprise, then my answer to Miss Cheng Li Hui's caution about wastage and Mr Desmond Choo's request for guidance for workers to use the Credit is yes, let us make sure the courses are inclusive and of good standards. Let us also leverage WDA and the Employment and Employability Institute (e2i) career coaches to give guidance. We can do all that.

But let us also have faith that individuals would make good decisions for themselves in time to come. Give them some time, space and freedom to discover, wonder, imagine and make individual decisions. Strike a balance, as Assoc Prof Randolph Tan has said.

Whatever people ultimately choose, we also need to suspend judgement a little. Who is to say that an engineer will not find learning fine arts and appreciating the aesthetics useful? Who is to say that a corporate trainer cannot learn photography, as Mr Baey Yam Keng had just cited? Remember how Steve Jobs learnt calligraphy and how he applied that in the development of iMac and all the beautiful fonts we see today?

Mr Baey Yam Keng and Mr Desmond Choo asked for an update on the take-up rate of the SkillsFuture Credit. From January to March this year, about 18,000 individuals have utilised their SkillsFuture Credit, with about $5.2 million disbursed. This is a healthy number, not a mad rush, yet a good response. What is encouraging is that 17% of them are aged 60 and above. We will be working with the People's Association to roll out more SkillsFuture courses through the community centres.

As suggested by Mr Ang Wei Neng, we will expand the list of eligible courses over time. By this month, we will have added about 2,500 courses to the list of eligible courses from just about four months ago.

Ms Denise Phua and Ms Chia Yong Yong have spoken about helping persons with disabilities learn skills and offered some specific suggestions. I have spoken to Minister Tan Chuan-Jin on this and we decided that between MOE and MSF, we will do a joint review on the Post-Secondary Education Account plus the SkillsFuture Credit, look at it together, rationalise and adjust it so that we can better support persons with disabilities. Give us some time.

As for life or executive coaching suggested by Mr Ang Hin Kee, we need to recognise that many of these are one-to-one sessions and are susceptible to abuse: you know, you coach me, I coach you, both of us collect $500 from the Government. It can happen. Let us look at it, but I agree with the Member that it can be useful to many people. Let us look at what practical steps we can take so that workers can use the Credit for genuine and useful executive or life coaching.

The final area of priority is innovation. SkillsFuture is not just about doing things skillfully. It has much to do with innovation, because mastery begets creativity and invention. It is hard to innovate if one does not know a subject deeply enough.

At the same time, knowledge advancement can also open up new grounds for new forms of mastery. Before the Internet breakthrough, there were no expert influencers or masters in web design or e-retailing. That is why all advanced economies need research universities. The quality of research is the key determinant of a university's standing internationally.

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Here, I want to make a comment about university rankings, in response to Mr Seah Kian Peng. Our universities have achieved strong international rankings. But we get this right. This is a practical advantage for the students, especially when they step out to look for work. But it is even more important when we examine why our universities have done well in rankings. Not because of the number of foreign students or foreign faculty, but they score best for their strong global reputation amongst academics and employers, which accounts for 50% of the weightage.

Having said that, rankings in themselves have no intrinsic value. So, Mr Seah Kian Peng is correct to have reservations about rankings. Universities exist for a larger and better purpose. We want our universities to make distinctive contributions to Singapore. This must include the core priority of nurturing and developing our young, and this must include discovering new knowledge and techniques that can rejuvenate industries, create new opportunities and help Singapore stay ahead.

To fulfil these objectives, our institutions must have a global outlook. The faculty will need to be diverse, bringing with them knowledge from all parts of the world. Amongst them, there should be global top names to help us accelerate this process.

Mr Seah Kian Peng asked about the share of local faculty in our universities. Today, it is about 45%. Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Oxford have a similar share of local faculty as our universities, but I have a big caveat here because when we look at it, the bases of compiling the data and definitions are very different, and so we may not be comparing apples to apples. This is why MOE has been hesitant to disclose these comparisons. MOE is a very precise Ministry. But walk around the campuses of these top universities, you will find that you, too, will feel the diversity of the faculty. Even if the data is not accurate, I think the sense is that they all have a diverse faculty. Having said that, ours are national universities and there also needs to be a balance between global diversity and having a Singapore character in our universities. This is a key balance to be struck and consistently and continuously fine tuned over time.

In teaching, the faculty must be able to teach students about Singapore and relate the subjects to the context of our part of the world. In research, we must, over time, develop deep, differentiated expertise highly relevant to Singapore and which the world takes an active interest in, whether it is water sufficiency, biodiversity, diabetes, urban planning or education.

I recently visited the Earth Observatory of Singapore at NTU, led by Prof Kerry Sieh, a very famous professor, formerly from Caltech. The team there, which includes local undergraduates, is part of the global effort to monitor volcanic activities all around the world. The devices are planted at MacRitchie Reservoir. They hope to use the information to predict the next big eruption, give early warning and save lives.

I asked Kerry, "Why did you choose Singapore?" He said, "You are near the ring of fire, but not on the ring of fire, that makes you an ideal spot to do this research." I thought to myself: how exciting! Singapore has a natural advantage in volcanic research! Surely, if there are bright young Singaporeans interested in this, they can learn from Kerry and his team and, over time, contribute to the sector, the centre, Singapore and even humanity.

Another example – MOE provides competitive research funding open to university researchers, with evaluation conducted by an international expert panel for neutrality and independence reasons. Earlier this year, I asked the Chairman of the Council, Prof Robert Brown, which was the largest research project that was awarded this year. He said it was a project on the Chikungunya and dengue viruses.

I looked it up. The actual name of the project is "Saliva-assisted transmission of pathogenic viruses by blood-feeding arthropods", dengue fever and Chikungunya, essentially. I asked him why he approved this particular one amongst so many proposals. He said because it was good science and it was relevant to Singapore. If international experts recognise the importance of research on Singapore-relevant subjects, all the more we must have the confidence to build up our indigenous capabilities in these subjects.

We are doing so in several areas. Prof Tan Khee Giap is developing important knowledge at the Asia Competitiveness Institute to help Singapore gain in-depth knowledge of the economy around us. Prof Lau Hoong Chuin heads the Fujitsu-SMU Corporate Lab. They are using big data analytics to optimise traffic flows and reduce congestion in Singapore. Assoc Prof Low Kay Soon and Prof Goh Cher Hiang respectively lead NTU's Satellite Research Centre and NUS' Satellite Programme. They led the design, construction and launch of six Singapore satellites last year.

We will nurture local academics who can produce quality work and contribute to Singapore. The universities' human resource systems have to value and recognise them. In this effort, we will leverage the Singapore Teaching and Academic Research Talent Scheme that was launched last year.

We will also use the platform of the Social Science Research Council to provide opportunities for local academics to put up their proposals to conduct research into areas that are important to Singapore's social development. MOE will be working closely with the autonomous universities on this effort.

Mdm Chairman, Minister Ng Chee Meng and I did not announce any major financial schemes during this COS debate. Our systems and institutions are well-developed. From here, higher performance of the machine is not pumping more fuel into the machine, and making it work harder, but instead, perhaps by rewiring and reprogramming it somewhat so that we optimise its performance and output.

Our vision of higher performance centres on the intrinsic worth and potential of a student, a vision that requires a dial-back from any excessive focus on academics and paper qualifications at all levels. We also want to focus on other aspects of learning; therefore, outdoor education, a review of the PSLE system, offer more choices and opportunities across all levels, focus on lifelong building of mastery and move towards aptitude-based admission into our IHLs.

We have described Singapore's future as a mountain range of successes. But we cannot assume that everyone wants to climb mountains.

I have a friend who recently went to Nepal and trekked the mountains. He spoke to his Sherpa guide and told the Sherpa, "You guys live in such a mountainous country. You must be a mountain people." The Sherpa replied, "You are wrong, we are not mountain people; we are valley people, we live in the valleys. In fact, if you go up to the mountains too high, you can die from altitude sickness."

We all have different destinations. Some of us go to the village, some to the city, seaside, riverbank, oasis, all kinds of destinations. It is a function of our gifts, dreams, resourcefulness and even luck. We all find different paths to get there.

Our children are growing up in a new world, striking paths into a Singapore that is more inclusive, all-embracing, a place where we can celebrate diverse talents and gifts. Education must be at the heart of this journey, guiding them in purpose, equipping them with skills and helping them seize the opportunities of their age.

The Chairman: Parliamentary Secretary Faishal Ibrahim, you have only 20 minutes divided between the two of you. So, please make good use of them.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Acting Ministers for Education (Assoc Prof Dr Muhammad Faishal Ibrahim): Thank you, Mdm Chair. My colleagues have spoken about MOE's continued efforts to provide a holistic education that prepares students for lifelong learning.

We agree with Mr Kok Heng Leun in his Budget Debate speech and Dr Intan Mokhtar that the arts play a crucial role in this endeavour. Arts education cultivates creativity, imagination, multiple perspectives and innovation; each trait is important in forging our future. It fosters a deeper appreciation of our shared culture and heritage, and promotes social harmony. Who among us is not moved with pride and a sense of belonging when we come together at the National Day Parade to sing "Home"? This is the power of the arts.

We want to harness this further by enhancing students' exposure to the arts and providing more opportunities for students with talent and passion to deepen their learning and pursue it at the tertiary level and beyond.

This year, four more secondary schools began offering the Enhanced Art or Music programmes, benefiting more than 300 students in the 10 schools offering these programmes. In addition, three more centres began hosting Art or Music Elective programmes, with students from over 30 schools selected through demonstrations of their talents and not their PSLE scores.

With expanded opportunities come a growing interest in the creative arts tertiary education sector. Enrolment into diploma-level courses increased by around 30% from 2006 to 2015, and by about 40% in degree-level courses from 2010 to 2015. Minister Ong Ye Kung has asked me to study this sector to see how we might improve on the current landscape and better position our creative arts graduates for careers that align their skills with industry needs. We also want to see how industry can contribute to deepening their skills.

I recently met representatives from arts institutions and polytechnics. Many shared that creative arts should be valued for how it develops the individual. They highlighted that creative arts graduates find employment in industries beyond the creative arts, such as retail and manufacturing, because they bring with them artistic skills and dispositions that can be cross-pollinated to benefit different industries.

One such graduate is Ms Sasha Rafi who found that Ngee Ann Polytechnic's School of Film and Media Studies helped to expand her skills in creative thinking, effective communication and management of group dynamics. These have been a significant help in her current role as head of marketing for the Singapore Grand Prix.

Ultimately, we want these graduates to have good career prospects, contribute to the vibrancy and diversity of our economy and society and, at the same time, keep developing their passion, skills and love for what they do. With more opportunities, students and parents need to make informed choices about the options available for further study or employment, including courses by PEIs. In response to Mr Ang Wei Neng, 50 PEIs offered degree programmes in 2015, with a student intake of around 21,500 Singaporeans and foreigners.

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Concerns raised by some hon Members about the quality and relevance of PEI-run courses are valid as this private market sector is highly heterogenous, with uneven standards. While CPE ensures PEIs meet minimum standards in corporate governance and course administration, it does not accredit or endorse the quality of their programmes.

Going forward, we will study how to improve information transparency about courses and employment outcomes, enhance industry-relevance of PEIs and ensure regulatory requirements of CPE remain relevant. The ongoing Graduate Employment Survey covers the nine largest PEIs, which cater for the bulk of private degree students. Survey results will be made public.

We will also study how more PEIs can offer industry-relevant training for continual skills upgrading and support manpower capability development in areas of industry need. Today, PEIs, like SEED Institute and At-Sunrice, already offer relevant training for skills upgrading and mastery.

While we take these steps, students and parents must do their part to get all the necessary information before deciding which courses to pursue. MOE's ECG efforts will help students assess their reasons and readiness to pursue further upgrading and if the course will help them acquire relevant skills for future employment. While I understand we have our own aspirations, I urge Singaporeans not to pursue qualifications as a paper chase but to develop their strengths, talents and skills.

Parental support is, therefore, crucial in helping our children develop the right instincts to make appropriate choices about education pathways, based on their passions and strengths. As raised by Mr Zainal Sapari, the partnership among the home and school is critical in helping children discover and nurture these strengths and interests.

We will continue to support our educators and parents in their partnership efforts. We have developed two resources for this: a Parent Engagement Guide for Educators and a parent-child activity book for all Primary 1 students. If you have a child or grandchild who is in Primary 1, you would have received this. I urge you to make use of this with your child.

We also collaborated with members of our advisory council, the COMmunity and PArents in Support of Schools (COMPASS), to launch the COMPASS-Parent Support Group (PSG) Mentoring Scheme to build PSG leaders' capabilities in structuring and growing as well as sustaining PSGs.

To support PSGs further, we are working with COMPASS to develop an online resource for PSG leaders. This resource is developed by parents, for parents, and will be ready in the latter half of this year. Madam, I will now end my speech in Malay.

(In Malay): [Please refer to Vernacular Speech.] Education prepares our children for a journey that requires them to undertake lifelong learning and master various skills. MOE will continue to focus on developing our children holistically by reducing the emphasis on academic results and offering multiple pathways to success. Hence, we are making several changes to the PSLE and increasing aptitude-based admissions at IHLs.

Parents play a critical role in supporting our children as they grow older. Give them the space and time to discover their strengths and interests and build a strong foundation of knowledge, skills and values that they can develop in their life. Work closely with their teachers to understand their strengths, in both academic and non-academic areas. That way, you will be able to guide them better in making better choices for themselves.

Navigating the education journey is not always easy and it will be helpful if parents seek the support of other parents. Parents can get support from other parents through PSGs in their children's schools.

For example, Mr Juraiman Rahim joined the Northland Primary PSG in 2014. Initially, his son was apprehensive about his father's presence and involvement in school. However, once he saw how his father was getting along well with his friends, he grew to appreciate having his father around. Juraiman now better understands his son's interest in chess and feels much closer to him. According to Mr Juraiman, the PSG experience "has been a learning journey for me".

Madam, by being involved in our children's education journey and working in close partnership with schools to develop their strengths and interests, we are helping our children to be better prepared for the future.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Acting Ministers for Education (Ms Low Yen Ling): Mdm Chair, today, the world has far more options for learning and education than before. There are thousands of courses. There are new types of courses in developing fields, such as app design, food technology, robotics and more. This creates an array of diverse choices that can also be potentially bewildering. Moreover, an individual's aspirations are likely to change with time and experience.

We want to help our students to navigate the complex universe of choices with confidence. This is a journey that our ECG counsellors embark on with our students, guiding them as their aspirations and experiences develop and mature over time.

With advice and assistance from the ECG counsellors, our students can then better understand their interests and strengths and make informed choices for their education and career path. The guidance provided is not prescriptive; rather, it aims to enhance the students' self-knowledge for decisions that will impact their career.

Mr Baey Yam Keng asked if counsellors know enough about what industries are looking for to effectively guide students to make such choices. I would like to reassure Mr Baey and hon Members that our ECG counsellors are well-trained and supported by a robust knowledge management system with up-to-date data from authoritative sources. The counsellors also conduct regular industry visits and are in direct contact with industry sectors, chamber of commerce and trade and industry associations. With such access, knowledge and networks, the ECG counsellors are well-positioned to give timely and relevant advice on various career prospects.

Just a few months back in February, 68 MOE ECG counsellors and WDA career coaches attended industry sharing sessions by experienced personnel from ECDA and SPRING Singapore. They also heard from homegrown companies, like the Soo Kee Group and Home-Fix DIY.

In addition, the counsellors are kept abreast of information on labour markets. Their learning journeys to the respective sectors also arm them with close-up knowledge and experience. For instance, the counsellors visited Keppel Offshore and Marine last month. This type of first-hand information, with interaction with the engineers and technicians, enable them to better counsel our students.

We will also leverage the existing pool of over 100 career coaches at WDA and e2i to provide individuals with an understanding of industry needs to better guide training decisions. These career coaches, generally, have good industry knowledge and are well-placed to assist jobseekers.

As WDA restructures, part of the agency – as hon Members would know from the earlier press release – will come under MOE, and the career coaches will be under MOM's wing. This move creates a multi-agency force working hard and closely together, linking the education front to the sphere of work very tightly, as well as with the various sectors of industries.

Mdm Chair, may I have your permission to display a few slides on the LED screen, please?

The Chairman: Yes, please. [Slides were shown to hon Members.]

Ms Low Yen Ling: ECG counsellors, such as Dorothea, Noormala and Muhd Faizal, are helping our young people discover their talents and interests, who, in turn, are more sure of what their next steps could be.

We are on track to having close to 100 ECG counsellors serving all schools, polytechnics and ITE colleges by end-2017. Mr Baey Yam Keng talked about the heavy responsibility that the ECG counsellors have. We agree, which is why we are taking great care to select suitable candidates with attributes, such as passion to work with young people, a positive and encouraging nature, and excellent interpersonal, communication and networking skills. We have filled nearly all positions for trained ECG counsellors at our polytechnics and ITEs – 47 out of 48. We have also recruited 14 ECG counsellors to support our secondary schools and junior colleges. More counsellors will join the force.

Our ECG Centres in MOE on Grange Road and in every polytechnic and every ITE college campus are fully operational and have been serving our students since the end of 2015.

Besides having the right guidance, getting wide exposure to relevant industries will help our young people gain a better grasp of what these fields may offer. Hence, we will partner industries even more closely to provide systematic programmes that increase our students' exposure to industries at a younger age. One such initiative is the ECG Fair for Secondary 2 students.

The first ECG fair was held at Tampines Secondary School just last month. More than 2,000 students and teachers participated in the exhibition featuring various education and career pathways. They attended career talks and also received practical hands-on experience related to the chemistry and life sciences sector. For some of them, this really broadened their horizon and perspective.

At the post-secondary level, we will strengthen our linkages with industries so that students will undergo meaningful internships and industry exposure. Last year, MOE announced that the polytechnics and ITE colleges would be appointed sector coordinators for 17 sectors. Today, we are pleased to reveal that we have appointed sector coordinators for 10 more sectors. There are now 27 sector coordinators in total, covering areas of Singapore's future growth and priority sectors. These new sectors are: air transport, design, electronics, energy and chemicals, environment management, human resource, landscape, precision engineering, sports and wellness, and tourism.

Last, but not least, I will now touch on the role and importance of our respective mother tongues. In a fast-changing world, they put us in good stead by giving us a strong anchor to our heritage. Mdm Chair, please allow me to conclude in Mandarin.

(In Mandarin):[Please refer to Vernacular Speech.] Bilingualism is the cornerstone of our education system and it enhances our capacity in different domains. For example, it strengthens our cultural and social identity and enables us to have a deeper appreciation of different ways of thinking. It also helps us to maintain close connections with our neighbouring countries, allowing us to communicate cordially and engage in deep exchanges and trade relations.

We are moving forward in the right direction and will continue to support the learning of mother tongue languages in several ways for the next five years.

In 2015, the Prime Minister announced that MOE will increase funding commitment to the three Mother Tongue Language Learning Promotion Committees by about 50% in the next five years to $25 million.

MOE will strive to provide an environment conducive for students to learn their mother tongue. We will continue to strengthen our partnership with the community, enhance current programmes, introduce meaningful initiatives and harness new technology and new media, so that the learning and use of mother tongue can blend more seamlessly into aspects of daily life. For the Committee to Promote Chinese Language Learning, the Government will commit up to $16 million in the next five years to support the committee's work to roll out more exciting and diverse programmes.

We believe our students will develop a deep love for their mother tongue language and their culture. MOE will try its best to help these students develop a rich understanding of their heritage and values to strengthen the unique multicultural heritage of Singapore.

On the other hand, through education and career counselling, MOE will also equip students with a better understanding of themselves and provide them with up-to-date information about the opportunities available, so that they can seize these opportunities to create a brighter future.

The Chairman: Time for clarifications. Mr Ang Hin Kee.

Mr Ang Hin Kee: Thank you, Mdm Chair. I have a question of clarification for Acting Minister Ong Ye Kung. Previously, I was concerned that, with the efforts, the private training provider may be sidelined. But I am glad that the Minister has mentioned that there is always a place for private training providers. I hope to hear whether or not MOE plans to invest in strengthening some of our local-bred training providers like, SEED Institute for Early Childhood Education, and whether we will help them expand and deepen their capabilities.

Secondly, the Minister also mentioned that he is open to having executive life coaches included in SkillsFuture credits. I was hoping that Minister could consider programmes with coaching involved in psychometric tests, like the Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance (DISC) or Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), and if such programmes can be launched soon or put on trial.

3.15 pm

Mr Ong Ye Kung: I thank Mr Ang Hin Kee. On SEED Institute, as Members know, we have actually supported it for some years and, in fact, SEED was a very strong contributor in training early childhood educators into the market. So, it has been a very strong partner.

Today, if I remember correctly, it still has a contract with WDA to work in partnership until 2019. Of course, we cannot pre-promise further contract extensions but I think it has a strong track record of being a good partner. I hope we can continue to work with SEED so long as it can continue to maintain its high standards of professionalism, governance and quality of training.

As for life coaching, we will take in the Member's suggestions. We will consider it in a way that does not lead to abuse.

The Chairman: Dr Lim Wee Kiak.

Dr Lim Wee Kiak: Chairman, I would like to ask the Minister of State regarding student care centres. I am quite glad to hear that all schools will have student care centres by 2020. my first clarification is: how does MOE plan to roll out this plan? Which are the areas that will have the student care centres first? I ask this because, in very high demand areas, like mine in Sembawang, we need more after-school care services. So, hopefully, when rolling out, the Ministry could consider the local demand.

Dr Janil Puthucheary: I thank Dr Lim for his question. The rollout will depend on a variety of factors. Local demand is certainly one of those. Space availability is also important. But the key issue for when a centre can develop and how long it will take us to reach a centre in every school is the availability of quality provision for student care centres. We do need to make sure that the providers of the service have the staff with the ability to provide appropriate services and sufficient supervision to make sure that the children are well-looked after. We take into account the suggestion that we should prioritise some areas and I will study it.

The Chairman: Ms Foo Mee Har.

Ms Foo Mee Har: Madam, I would like to thank the Acting Minister for bringing up the subject of aptitude admissions. Clearly, the Acting Minister did not open a can of worms but really open up a window of opportunity for many young people.

So, Madam, I would like to ask the Acting Minister on real cases. For example, a resident who met me last night, for five years, he has tried to go into polytechnic, having completed his Higher Nitec.

In that period, he has taken on roles working in McDonald's, Sushi Express, human resource, doing sales in a bank, all wanting to pursue a diploma in polytechnic to do business studies. He is articulate. He is positive. He has lots of energy. He participated in the Youth Wing. These are all the qualities you would want.

So, my clarification, Madam, is whether, for an individual like that who has attempted three times, the Ministry would consider his case for this year's admission rather than wait till next year where he has to wait yet another year.

Mr Ong Ye Kung: I thank Ms Foo Mee Har. I confirm that I have received her appeal and we will look into it. But I just want to sound a note of caution here. Because the Member rattled off some things that he did. When we talk about aptitude-based admissions, it is different from saying that you cannot meet the academic cut-off and, therefore, I take your sports and your community work into account and I deem that you meet the cut-off point. It is not like that. That is what we call discretionary admission, to make up for a failure to meet a cut-off point.

This is aptitude-based admission. That means, if he has really worked very hard on the ground over all the years, helping the disabled, the needy and the low-income and now he says, "I want to do a degree or I want to do a Diploma in Social Work", that is a consideration for aptitude-based admission.

I just handled a case recently. She is a mature candidate. She never did a diploma before; worked in the food and beverage (F&B) industry for 17 years; now, being a mature worker, she wants to do a diploma full time and so she puts her name through the system based on aggregate score, in her case it is GCE "O" levels 17 years ago. On that, she was sent to the nursing course. She appealed to me to say, "Why nursing? I have been working in F&B for 17 years." So, we raised her appeal to the polytechnic. The polytechnic interviewed her and put her into a Food Science and Nutrition programme, which is exactly what she wanted.

These are the kinds of examples that we hope we can have more of in future.

The Chairman: Ms Kuik Shiao-Yin.

Ms Kuik Shiao-Yin: I have a question for Acting Minister Ng Chee Meng about report cards. First, I would like to clarify whether this new style of qualitative report card is practised consistently throughout all schools at all levels because it does not seem to be the experience on the ground.

The second question is: how can MOE also work with schools to clarify the mixed messaging that some parents are getting because I have heard of parents who are quite happy with the progressive report cards they are getting but, at the same time, they are also getting these assessment schedules, detailing extensively what is the weightage of grades and all that kind of stuff? Their complaint is that they are both confused about what the system wants from them, the holistic assessment, and there is also an issue of distrust. They are not sure whether there has been a real shift at all.

The third question is: I am aware that it is a work in progress, but is MOE working towards consistently connecting the non-academic competencies that they are tracking on these report cards to the desired key stage outcomes that MOE has listed? This is because, for example, at the primary school level, one of the eight desired key stage outcomes is awareness of the arts and, clearly, there are not many primary schools prioritising this as a competency on a large scale.

Mr Ng Chee Meng: I thank the Member for the questions. The answer is yes, it is implemented across all schools and if there are instances where there is unevenness in the implementation, we would appreciate if the Member can let us know and maybe we can look into that. On the rest of the issues that the Member has mentioned, I do not have those details today. If the Member does not mind, I can take it offline with her to clarify those specifics.

The Chairman: Mr Leon Perera.

Mr Leon Perera: Mdm Chairperson, just two points. Firstly, a point of clarification to the Acting Minister on the issue of class sizes which he discussed in relation to what Assoc Prof Daniel Goh had mentioned. The Minister mentioned there is no proven causal link between smaller class sizes and better educational outcomes. I would like to ask, if that is the case, then why is it that the OECD average is smaller, why is it that our GEP classes are smaller, why is it that our international schools in Singapore have smaller class sizes and why is it that the tuition centre classes that we have in Singapore all have smaller class sizes than the norm, compared to the primary and secondary schools?

The Minister alluded to the fact we can generate good educational outcomes in Singapore based on tests like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and so on in spite of having larger class sizes than the OECD average. But we have to bear in mind that that is also with the help of the $1 billion tuition industry.

My question and my suggestion are − and relating to the point about sustainability − right now, we have a situation where enrolments are gradually declining and, if we assume that the attrition rate remains stable and that teachers are not made redundant, would not this create an opportunity to redeploy teachers in such a way as to reduce the class size, to avail ourselves of those kinds of benefits? So, that is my first point.

My second point is: just in relation to the increased emphasis on outdoor learning with OBS and so on, what are the provisions being made for students with physical disabilities in order to be inclusive towards them?

Mr Ng Chee Meng: I thank the Member for the questions. What I said in the speech is that on class size, according to research, on a systemic basis, there is no conclusive evidence. But we do go on a needs basis to tailor our education programmes for specific needs, whether it is GEP or for Normal (Technical) classes. Where the class size of Normal (Technical) is concerned, in Spectra and Crest secondary schools, we go down to 20 per class to meet those needs. So, it is not just an issue of having a smaller class size for GEPs but according to the needs. Both ends of the spectrum.

On OE learning and physical disabilities, we are running a pilot programme and it will be implemented in 2017. I would like to update that, just last evening, we were talking to Ms Denise Phua about how to have this inclusive programme for children with different disabilities. So long as they can meet the criteria of certain programmes, we would like to include them in those OE opportunities.

The Chairman: Dr Intan Azura.

Dr Intan Azura Mokhtar: Madam, I would like to ask Parliamentary Secretary Muhammad Faishal with regard to the enhancements to the Creative Arts. How do the skills of Arts graduates from our polytechnics, NAFA or LASALLE meet industry requirements? And I understand that four more secondary schools will have the Enhanced Arts Programme. Are there plans to extend or eventually introduce this to all secondary schools?

My second clarification, Madam, is to Acting Minister Ng Chee Meng. I note that the Minister has not touched on reviewing academic streams in his response. But I would like to urge the Ministry to review academic streams in tandem with the PSLE review. I recognise that it is not easy because having the academic streams have made Secondary 1 posting and teaching a lot more expedient and targeted, but I think the timing is right. With five years or six years before the PSLE review kicks in, we should attempt to move away from this self-limiting sorting.

Assoc Prof Dr Muhammad Faishal Ibrahim: I thank Dr Intan for the questions. With regard to the second question, what we have now is we have three more centres which are already hosting Art or Music Elective Programme (AEP), whereby students who are interested can also be routed to these centres.

Interestingly, I have the case of a student which I had no time earlier to mention during my COS speech. It is this student from Kent Ridge Secondary School, Leonard Chia. He did not get a place in a school which offered AEP but because of the three centres that we have, they enabled students like him to be able to have opportunities to take on the courses. We will monitor the situation. Nevertheless, we can see the value of art education to our people.

With regard to the arts education and graduates meeting the industry's need, you realise that when you engage someone who has those capabilities and that education journey, they are actually equipped with a multitude of skills. For example, these skills can be transferred and applied to the various industries. They are able to think critically on certain issues and they also have this sense of aesthetics where they are able to innovate and create products, which I think is very useful.

I gave the example of Ms Sasha earlier. She found that what she learned in her polytechnic became very useful in marketing. That has somehow given her an edge and her employer, Singapore Grand Prix, found it very useful.

Another area is the user-experience design where, today, we see more and more companies, like OCBC Bank, the Airport SilverKris Lounge, as well as offices like HDB in Punggol, where they use such skills to innovate to enhance the user's experience. Our Arts graduates would be able to meet such a need in the demand for the industry.

All these are happening and you see the changing landscape not only in terms of what they can do but in terms of employment and job scope. And of course, at the local arts institutions, we have enhanced internships for the students who can learn from companies and transit to working life better.

The Chairman: I still see a lot of hands. Please keep your clarifications short. The purpose of clarifications is to seek clarification on the replies by the front bench, but not to add new points or to start another speech. Acting Minister Ng Chee Meng.

3.30 pm

Mr Ng Chee Meng: Yes, Mdm Chair, I would like to reply to Dr Intan's question to me.

The Chairman: Yes, please.

Mr Ng Chee Meng: I thank the Member for the question. I appreciate the concern raised. But an equally important point in our education system is that, at the PSLE juncture, we would like to determine, after six years of education, how to tailor the secondary school curriculum to the needs of the individual child. As we know, each individual child has different abilities, learning paces and learning needs. PSLE, together with streaming, has allowed us to place students into the appropriate courses to best cater to their learning needs.

I have joined the Ministry for about six months and I looked at the history of our education. In the long past, we lost about 40% of our Primary 1 cohorts who started but did not finish secondary education. With the combination of different things that we have done, we have reduced dropout rates to less than 1%. So, this tailoring, while I do understand some of the potential downsides, does have its important educational outcomes.

But I hear the Member. Over time, the educators have also tried their very best to do different things to allow lateral transfers, across streams. Even where we have, let us say, a Normal (Academic) student who has done well, we will permit transfer to the Express course. For specific subjects, under subject-based banding, if we see a student who is very good at Mathematics and may be in Normal (Academic), we do permit and encourage him to take Mathematics at the Express level. These things that we are doing allow porosity. We try our very best to afford the opportunities for the student to excel in whichever course he may be in. This will always be evolving and we will be continuing to study the Member's proposals to see how we can further improve.

The Chairman: Ms Denise Phua.

Ms Denise Phua Lay Peng: Madam, I would like to pose two questions to the two Acting Ministers. One, a lot of the plans that were outlined by the Acting Minister is for what you do for the students and to the students. But I said in my sharing that I think the education sector is not immune to the changes of this world. I wanted to hear the Acting Minister's views on what SkillsFuture plans MOE has for itself to address the new economy. How does the Ministry plan to help its staff meet these challenges and also adjust to these challenges?

Two, this is for Acting Minister Ng, on the PSLE review. It is definitely an improvement so that it is not such a fine score to work on. However, at the end of it, it still boils down to grades. I am just wondering what the Acting Minister thinks will be the game changer or the key that will unlock Singaporeans from our habit of chasing the grades and chasing the scores through tuition and, definitely, wanting to go for a degree for that matter. So, I am just wondering how the Acting Minister feels about that.

Mr Ong Ye Kung: I thank Ms Denise Phua for her questions. The SkillsFuture plan for MOE will comprise the following. One is for teachers and, that is, at NIE. NIE has always been updating its curriculum and moving forward. It has a big role to play in SkillsFuture to upgrade and deepen the skills of our teachers.

At the polytechnics and ITE, many of them come from industry and they have to continue this strong effort to make sure that there is a rotation of their lecturers moving between academia and industry. That way, they keep abreast of what is happening in the industry and bring the lessons back into the polytechnics and ITE.

In universities, I actually spoke about this in my speech, where I shared research plays a big role because in our research universities, generation of knowledge is a core business and this is something we have to do better, especially for subjects relevant to Singapore and involving both global as well as local talent.

Finally, throughout MOE, all of us have the SkillsFuture Credit. As a Ministry, we will be giving them time, space and freedom to decide what to study.

Mr Ng Chee Meng: Mdm Chair, can I have your permission to answer the second part?

The Chairman: Yes, please.

Mr Ng Chee Meng: I thank the Member for the question. There is really no easy straightforward solution, no silver bullet answer that I can give for cause-effect outcomes. As I have tried to articulate just now, it requires a collective paradigm shift involving all of us, what we do for the student, so on and so forth, including societal definitions of success, things that Acting Minister Ong Ye Kung spoke about.

So, we do require a partnership with parents and students with the community and, ultimately, in the workplaces as well, on what would people eventually value. That is why in my speech I said that it would take time.

MOE has taken some steps and we are taking bolder steps to review many of these structures and policies. We want to take the step to reduce fine differentiation so that we, at least, free up some space for the students to smell the flowers, as I have mentioned.

MOE, however, cannot do any of these alone. We need all the different stakeholders to come on board with us, to value other areas beyond academics. The three areas that I have spoken about, we should look at them in totality and embrace them to reduce the emphasis on academics, more emphasis on non-academic areas, including character and values, and also provide, over time, a realisation of the possibility of every school being a good school, to open up choices and opportunities for students to pick and choose schools that will best meet their needs. I think this paradigm shift is needed and, again, I do apologise that I do not have a silver bullet answer, a simple one that will be able to move us into the realm that Ms Denise Phua has mentioned.

The Chairman: Mr Desmond Choo.

Mr Desmond Choo: Mdm Chair, I would like to ask Acting Minister Ong Ye Kung if we can have coaches and ambassadors to guide people on SkillsFuture-related initiatives, for example, in the use of the Credit.

Mr Ong Ye Kung: I thank the Member for the question. As the Member knows, in NTUC, they set up e2i, which is a tripartite organisation with about 100 employability coaches. Likewise, when we set up WDA in 2003, we also took in all the employability coaches from the Community Development Councils (CDCs) and on the ground, that is, another 100-plus. So, we have over 200 people in the system who have done this for the last 10 years: meeting industry, meeting jobseekers and giving coaching. Let us be very careful. Let us not hire a whole new army every time we start a new scheme. There is an existing group of people with the experience that we can use and leverage to deliver this service that Mr Desmond Choo spoke about. And I think he has also just realised I have shot the arrow back to him.

The Chairman: Assoc Prof Daniel Goh.

Assoc Prof Daniel Goh Pei Siong: This is for Acting Minister Ng Chee Meng. While it is true that there is inconclusive research on the causal link between reduced class size and teaching and education outcomes on a systemic level, and that is because academics are so good at destroying at one another's research, there are provisional conclusive results that reduced class size would positively affect education outcomes for disadvantaged students, especially in the US and UK.

Given this conclusion, and because the Minister said that there is a possibility of considering improvements to the class sizes, would the Ministry consider pilot studies on reducing class sizes in secondary schools, for example, in mainstream schools that have more students with financial assistance, to see whether results would bear fruit in Singapore?

My second clarification is actually for the "Teach for Singapore" programme.

The Chairman: Keep it short, please, Assoc Prof Goh.

Assoc Prof Daniel Goh Pei Siong: Yes. What avenues are there for teachers who are passionate to teach disadvantaged students to take a sabbatical to upgrade themselves with skills outside the regular academic fields so that they can go and teach the disadvantaged students and then, to request for a transfer, where can they go and teach the disadvantaged students?

Mr Ng Chee Meng: I thank the Member for the questions. Perhaps, I will just give an update to Assoc Prof Daniel Goh. When we do a needs-based approach, we provide the necessary resources to disadvantaged students. In Primary 1 and 2, as I had mentioned, if students joining our schools are not able to catch up, we take them out of the form class into a smaller size of maybe eight to 10 students and we provide dedicated teaching resource, one or two teachers, to level them up in English or literacy or numeracy skills, for up to two years. In the time that I have been in MOE, if I recall the numbers correctly, about 6% of our students benefit from these programmes. They do graduate out of these support programmes. So, it is very tailored, as per our philosophy, where there is need, we will put in the necessary resources to level our children up.

For the posting suggestion that Assoc Prof Goh mentioned, when I visited Spectra Secondary School in Woodlands, I was very impressed by one teacher. She was a teacher at Raffles Institution. But because of her deeply ingrained desire to make a bigger difference to children with low progress, she decided to ask for a transfer to Spectra. As I had mentioned in my speech, in the context of Singapore, through NIE, we have a central institute, if you will, to train teachers to a very high quality. In this central system, we do allow these transfers for teachers with the passion that Assoc Prof Goh had mentioned.

The Chairman: Mr Seah Kian Peng.

Mr Seah Kian Peng: Two quick clarifications. To Acting Minister Ong Ye Kung, I want to clarify that he agrees with me that, for certain faculties where local context is important, such as Political Science and Public Policy, having an adequate core of Singaporean academics in such faculties is useful. If so, is the Acting Minister satisfied with the current status? And if not, what steps will be taken, going forward?

To Acting Minister Ng Chee Meng, I am heartened by the changes being made for the proposed changes to the PSLE system. Is the Acting Minister confident that with these proposed changes, it will truly reduce stress?

Mr Ong Ye Kung: I thank the Member for the questions. As I mentioned in my speech, ultimately, our local universities and the teachers, whether they are teaching or researching, must be able to teach Singaporean students about Singapore and put it in the context of what is happening in our part of the world.

Must it be only Singaporean faculty that can do that? I do not want to judge. I have met many foreign faculty and foreigners living in Singapore for a long time. Some of them serve in the SAF Volunteer Corp I talked about yesterday. And their hearts are with Singapore. So, I would not say that this is something only Singaporean faculty can do. So, I suspend judgement here. Ultimately, I do think, in a faculty, putting whatever they teach in our context is important. That, I agree with the Member.

Mr Ng Chee Meng: I thank the Member for the question. I am confident that our school system will do our very best to provide those opportunities and create that environment for our kids. But as I have said in the speech, it is a collective paradigm shift. MOE cannot do it alone.

Stress is something that is an aggregate of different factors. In our school system, as the Members would know, ultimately, there is a personal choice involved: what the students may want to do, what the parents may want him or her to do. We must make this collective shift together, otherwise, the likelihood that it will just continue with a high-stress, high-focus emphasis on academics will continue.

3.45 pm

For us to move out of this as a society, I have put up the proposal for us to really look at the totality of education. Do not just overly focus on academics because there are other areas that will be equally important that would lead to good life outcomes, whether it is leadership skills, the ability to take initiative or the tenacity to carry on despite setbacks.

I recently met a group of industry leaders for lunch. They tell me that they are very confident about our Singaporean workers, in that they have the ability, the intellect. But they hope and they gave feedback to us that they hope that our Singaporean worker or graduate from our school system would demonstrate some other abilities or attributes, especially initiative, how to seize opportunities and not just solve problems that are given to the Singaporean in the workplace.

Hopefully, through these steps that we are taking and, over time, with patience, we make a collective paradigm shift that would be needed for the next step of Singapore's development.

The Chairman: Last clarification. Mr Png Eng Huat.

Mr Png Eng Huat (Hougang): Thank you, Madam. This question is for Acting Minister Ng Chee Meng, still on the subject of class size, but for secondary school. There is a falling cohort size. Would the Ministry consider taking the opportunity to reduce class size then for secondary schools, rather than not posting any student to those secondary schools and eventually those schools got to merge or close?

Mr Ng Chee Meng: I thank the Member for the question. With reference to school mergers, falling cohort size is a reality. Enrolment is coming down across the different schools. It would not be right to roll back enrolment in a healthy secondary school to bolster up the lowered enrolment in the other secondary schools because this would lead to a distortion of outcomes.

In our philosophy, when we look at merging schools, we want the students to have the best opportunities to explore different programmes. If you do not have the critical mass in low enrolment schools, we will not be able to afford the programmes, the CCAs that Members have also mentioned. If it is 400 students versus 1,200 students, you can see the potential differences in opportunities to be given to the 400 and the 1,200. So, we do need a certain critical mass and there is a certain design in our school system that affords us these resources for them to run all these different CCA and so on and so forth.

The Chairman: Ms Denise Phua, do you wish to withdraw your amendment?

Ms Denise Phua Lay Peng: Madam, Education is the social leveller, transformer of lives, potential game changer for the future of people in countries. So, I just want to thank the Acting Ministers, Minister of State, the Parliamentary Secretaries and the rest of the MOE team for their commitment, their diligence in sticking to this journey of delivering excellent education for all of us, regardless of our age and abilities. Thank you so much for doing this.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

The sum of $12,140,000,000 for Head K ordered to stand part of the Main Estimates.

The sum of $660,000,000 for Head K ordered to stand part of the Development Estimates.

The Chairman: Order. I propose to take the break now.

Thereupon Mdm Speaker left the Chair of the Committee and took the Chair of the House.

Mdm Speaker: Order. I suspend the Sitting and will take the Chair at 4.10 pm.

Sitting accordingly suspended

at 3.50 pm until 4.10 pm.

Sitting resumed at 4.10 pm

[Mdm Speaker in the Chair]

Debate in Committee of Supply resumed.

[Mdm Speaker in the Chair]