Politics

Singapore GE2020: Ensuring social mobility starts from childhood, says Tharman


Most of life’s inequalities can be traced back to people’s childhood and that is why the Government’s efforts on social mobility start when Singaporeans are young, said Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam yesterday.

Deep interventions are critical in the early years to spur children from all walks of life to do well in school, he added.

“We are determined to make every effort to help kids who start off with low-income families to have hope in life, to have confidence, and to enter primary school brimming with enthusiasm.

“It can be done,” said Mr Tharman, who is also the Coordinating Minister for Social Policies, during the People’s Action Party’s (PAP) talk show series on Facebook called Straight Talk.

One way the Government has been doing this is by raising the quality of pre-school education, he added, pointing out that it is doubling its expenditure in the next few years.

He also said that in five years, 80 per cent of pre-school education will be supported by the Government, up from 30 per cent eight years ago. Last year, the Early Childhood Development Agency announced that annual spending by the Government on the early childhood sector will double to more than $2 billion in the next few years. This is up from the $1 billion spent in 2018.

Another move to lift standards in the pre-school sector is teacher training, Mr Tharman said, noting that the National Institute of Early Childhood Development has been started to do this.

Beyond these efforts, targeted help for children is available too, he added. He held up the KidStart programme that provides advice and support to families on aspects of bringing up children, such as nutrition and parent-child interaction. It was introduced in 2016. About 5,000 children are set to go through it in the next few years, he said.

Still, more will be done for children who are further behind in their studies, even as such students in Singapore are already allocated the smallest of class sizes and the highest expenditure.

“We’re hiring more teachers, more teacher counsellors, more professionals of other types to be in our schools to strengthen the whole school team to help every student in need,” he stressed.

Mr Tharman said Singapore has one of the best school systems in the world and the country ends up at the top of the tables for subjects such as reading and mathematics. But it is not just its averages that are high, he added. “Our children from lower-income backgrounds substantially outperform children from lower-income backgrounds in the advanced countries,” he said.

In fact, they do better than even the average child in countries such as Switzerland, France, Germany and Sweden, he added.

Work has also gone into preventing a digital divide in Singapore, said the Senior Minister, noting that no matter how poor a family is, every child will have broadband Internet to use at home, which will cost as little as $6 per month. Each child will also have a computer at home, and if the children are on the Education Ministry’s financial aid scheme, they will not have to pay for one.

Yesterday, Mr Tharman also pointed out that divisions between children are being reduced by the Government, citing how primary school streaming was abolished more than 10 years ago.

In the same vein, secondary schools are moving away from streaming and towards full subject-based banding. The move does not just help students discover their strengths in specific subjects, but also serves a social aim.

“It enables students to mix more with each other and to interact more with each other as they grow up, and never think that ‘I’m stronger than someone else’, or ‘I’m weaker than someone else’,” he said.

Singapore, he added, has more to do to reduce life’s inequalities experienced by children, and this requires working with families and professionals to give all children a chance to not be left behind.

“It just means we need deeper interventions, deeper partnerships on the ground with social service professionals, deeper partnerships with families to help unshackle them from their challenges,” he said.





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