Explosive News for Singapore

At the centre of this explosive news is the Lien Foundation, a Singapore-based philanthropic organisation. In 2011 it commissioned the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) to conduct a survey of early education — for children aged three to six — in 45 countries. They comprised 29 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and 16 major emerging markets — Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Taiwan, Russia, Argentina, Malaysia, South Africa, Thailand, Brazil, Ghana, Vietnam, China, the Philippines, Indonesia and India.

Singapore came in 29th overall, 25th in availability, 21st in affordability and 30th in quality. For a country that has had its students achieve outstanding results in international standardised tests in Maths and Science for Primary 4 and Secondary 2 students since the 1990s, this is a rude awakening — and unacceptable , given that it vies for first place in everything.

Shortly after this, the Lien Foundation followed its Starting Well Index with Vital Voices for Vital Years, a study of 27 early childhood educators’ perspectives on improving this sector in Singapore. At the same time it conducted an online survey for parents, which received close to 1,400 responses. Repeatedly, these reports gave the Singapore authorities something to think about.

In Vital Voices for Vital Years, all 27 experts agreed that a high quality pre-school education would provide our children with a better future, especially those born to poor families. The government was therefore nudged further towards the realisation that an investment in this area is crucial for the country’s growth.

Of the 1,395 parents who responded to the online survey, 96 per cent felt that pre-school education was important or very important and 73 per cent were satisfied with what their children were receiving, but there were also 73 per cent who said that they were ambivalent or dissatisfied with the accessibility, affordability and/or quality of Singapore’s pre-school sector.

One parent complained about his experience when he was looking for a pre-school for his child. He called some 25 pre-schools and found that their fees ranged from $250 to $2,000 a month. He felt that such a range was “ridiculous”.

This parent’s opinion upsets me a lot. When Singapore first became independent, founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew said that although people weren’t equal he nevertheless wanted “a trishaw rider’s child and a billionaire’s child [to have] the same opportunities to enter school. Whoever performed better would have better chances of being promoted to the next level”. Under his governance, no mainstream school was exclusively for the rich. Every elite school had students from both ends of the wealth spectrum, and this was something Singaporeans were rightly proud of.

Establishing Wealth Disparity from the Start

But some time ago the Singapore government allowed private enterprises to provide early childhood education and to set their fees according to the quality of service that they offered. Children born into poor families now appeared to have no choice but to submit to their lot in life, losing out at the most critical starting line of all, and forever destined to lead a harder life than their peers. I wonder now how much the government will have to pay for this in terms of social cost?

When The Straits Times reported the news of the Starting Well Index, it called it a wake-up call. The leaders of Singapore were also worried by what it had to say.

At the National Day Rally on 26 August last year Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong expressed his opinion that although 99 per cent of our children were receiving pre-school education, the sector was still developing and a lot more needed to be done. He then announced that the government would soon set up a statutory board to improve the quality of the whole sector, and furthermore, that it would also start to invest significant resources in it.

He stressed that the government’s goal was to make sure that every child began on the same starting line so that their future progress was not unfairly handicapped — something that is especially important for the children of less well-to-do families.

Inadequate Focus on Early Childhood Education

Because Singapore is a tiny nation without natural resources, we cannot afford to lose time, manpower or money, so whatever we do needs to have immediate effect. Realism and pragmatism have become national traits, and our education policies are often based on addressing market demand as their first consideration. The lack of focus on early childhood education can therefore be measured by the lack of government funding in this area. It was 1983 before the Financial Assistance Scheme for enrolment at childcare centres was started, and 1988 before the Child Care Centres Act was passed.

The early childhood sector in Singapore was always the preserve of the private sector, and not part of formal mainstream schooling. Kindergartens were not affiliated to schools. For example, nearly sixty years ago, founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew sent his son Mr Lee Hsien Loong to the private Nanyang Kindergarten when he was two or three years old, so that he could grow up immersed in the Chinese language and culture.

When Singapore was rapidly industrialising in the 1960s it was necessary for women to return to the workforce. Two organisations closely linked to the government — PAP Community Foundation and the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) — worked together to try and make this happen. From our interview with Mrs Yu-Foo Yee Shoon in this issue, we can see how she started from scratch with a group of like-minded women and in the process wrote the history of early childhood education in Singapore.

At the end of the 1970s, when the government was trying to help recruit students for Chinese primary schools, it opened pre-primary programmes for five- and six-year-olds. These were immensely popular but they were later replaced by preparatory classes, which were themselves phased out in the 1990s.

NTUC First Campus and PAP Community Foundation have now become the anchor operators for the provision of early childhood education, and they receive appropriate government subsidies to do this. But even though they are the biggest and the primary operators, they still only make up 20 per cent of the market. The other 80 per cent of childcare centres and kindergartens are operated by private entities not affiliated to the government.

The Singapore government has historically made pre-school education the servant of two masters. Childcare centres fell under the purview of the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF) while kindergartens were taken care of by the Ministry of Education (MOE). However, neither of these Ministries actually provided early childhood services. The curriculum framework and quality of education for this age group were only formally set by the MOE very recently. It was also only at the start of this year that the MOE announced that they would establish 15 kindergartens within the next three years.

Currently there are 1,051 childcare centres in Singapore, a number that is expected to grow by 200 in the next five years. As for kindergartens, there were only 498 last year — a figure that reflects the increasing trend of converting them to childcare centres that provide full-day childcare services.

As the majority of childcare services are privately run, they face the problem of sky-rocketing rents in both the commercial and the residential property sectors. Commonly, this cost is passed on to the parents. In 2008 the government was encouraging more women to give birth so it increased its childcare subsidy from $150 to $300, but even this was not enough to solve the problem of rising school fees. Even though the government may have given more and increasing aid to low-income families, there is still a sandwiched class of families which continues to feel powerless.

Having the operators treat their services as a business is inevitable. However, to remain profitable in such a steep rental environment it is perhaps unsurprising that they cannot always afford to employ properly qualified staff. Many schools therefore turn a blind eye to the need for quality teachers. But if the teachers are fully trained and paid accordingly then, what with the high rental costs as well, extortionate fees become almost unavoidable.

School Fees Determine Quality

And so early childhood education in Singapore has reached a stage where school fees determine quality. Parents are well aware of this, and when they have to choose between quality and affordability they are clearly between a rock and a hard place. That these fees range, astonishingly, from $55 to $2,000 a month also shows the extent of the wealth disparity that we now have in Singapore. It is difficult not to ask how many of our children are adversely affected by this, either because they are forced to attend poor quality pre-schools or, in some cases, because they receive no pre-school education at all.

When some Members of Parliament became concerned about this issue and asked in January 2010 whether it wasn’t time for the government to intervene, former Minister for Education Dr Ng Eng Hen answered their question by pointing out that formalising pre-school education would have the effect of making it too focussed on academic learning as it would need to be guided by the character and aims of the primary education sector, of which it would necessarily become a part. He also added that there were many other countries around the world that did not consider early childhood education to be part of formal schooling.

The inadequate development of Singapore’s early childhood education was finally evident when it was ranked 29th in the Starting Well Index. Under quality, Singapore was ranked 30th, or 15th from the bottom. This was a call that the government could no longer ignore as the future social and economic price of any further neglect of this area was now clear.

Mr Lee Poh Wah, CEO of the Lien Foundation, revealed during his interview with us that after the publication of the Starting Well Index he was immediately contacted by the Ministry of Finance with the request that he ask the EIU economists to furnish the Ministry with a full report on the issue.

In this year’s Budget Speech Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, duly announced that the government would be investing $3 billion in early childhood education over the next five years — which is more than double the sum set aside in the past. He said that this was to allow parents access to high quality and affordable childcare so that their children did not lose out at the start of their educational careers.

The Early Childhood Development Agency (ECDA), a statutory board, was then set up on 1 April 2013. Under the leadership of Dr Lee Tung Jean, it will produce the master plan for the development of early childhood education in Singapore. During her interview with us she spoke from the broad perspectives of education, sociology and economics, and painted a picture of the future that we can now start to look forward to.

With the interview taking place on 24 April, we can already see how swiftly her team are getting down to work. On 13 June the Housing Development Board (HDB), with the assistance of the ECDA, revised the tender system for the bidding of spaces under void decks for use as childcare centres and kindergartens. Under the new model the parameters will be holistic and not just a matter of the highest bidder winning. Taken into consideration now will be affordability, track record, curriculum, quality of programme and whether the operator intends to offer assistance to low-income families.

We hope to hear of more initiatives in the near future.

In the words of our interviewee and early childhood specialist Ms Peggy Zee, the Singapore government is “very concerned for its people. They plan for them very well. They do have ears, whether their people believe them or not”. Although Singapore came in 29th in the report, i.e. 16th from the bottom, it will surely rise very quickly now, simply because it cannot afford not to be competitive.

Translated by: Lee Xiao Wen

新加坡在报告中还被专家“惊讶地”研证“国家提供学前教育的能力与国富无关”，在提供学前教育方面“不给力”。新加坡与澳大利亚、加拿大、美国同被列进“富国也排名低劣”的榜单中，被点名批评。

像炸弹似威力十足的消息

这个像炸弹似威力十足的消息，由新加坡向来关注幼儿及老人福利的慈善机构“连氏基金”引爆。连氏基金在2011年，委任英国“经济学人信息部”向45个国家为三岁至六岁孩童提供的学前教育进行调查。这45个国家包括29个经济合作与发展组织(OECD)国家和16个新兴经济体：香港、阿拉伯联合酋长国、新加坡、台湾、俄国、阿根廷、马来西亚、南非、泰国、巴西、加纳、越南、中国、菲律宾、印尼、印度。

新加坡在整体排名，名列29；在“供应量”栏目排25；在“负担得起”栏目排21；在“素质”栏目排30。这与新加坡自上世纪九十年代中，小四和中二学生参与世界学生能力评比，数学和科学屡屡在排名榜上鳌头独占的威风，成了天渊之别。这绝对是让样样要第一的新加坡人无法接受的事实。

紧接着，连氏基金又推出了一份集合了27位幼儿教育专家意见，名为《给重要幼年的重要意见》的报告书。同时开放网上问卷，收集了近1400名家长的意见。接二连三，给了新加坡相关当局重击。

专家在《给重要幼年的重要意见》报告书表明了高素质幼儿教育能给新生代美好的明天，尤其能改变来自贫穷家庭孩童的命运。所以政府应该明白投资幼儿教育对国家的发展是极其重要！

1395名新加坡家长在网上接受调查，虽然96%人认为幼儿教育对孩子很重要，73%也满意孩子幼儿教育的安排，却也有相同人数（73%）的家长对新加坡幼儿教育的学费、课程和教师的素质、还有供应量表示不满，认为有太大须要改善的空间。

一名家长吐苦水说，为了孩子入学，他打了25个电话给25个幼儿中心，发现学费竟然在250元至2000元之间（还有最便宜是55元），这接近10倍的差距，让他感觉“实在太荒谬了”！

家长的意见让我深有感慨。新加坡建国之初，建国总理李光耀表明“人是不平等”的，但“我要为他们提供公平受教育的机会，让三轮车夫的孩子和百万富翁的孩子，能有同窗接受教育的机会。”在他这个崇高的治国理念下，新加坡教育系统的正规学校，至今没有一所贵族学校！任何名校都有穷爸爸和富爸爸，这是让新加坡人感到骄傲的。

从小设定贫富悬殊的鸿沟

然而曾几何时，新加坡政府竟然让由私人企业办的幼儿园以天价的学费、天价的素质，为新加坡人从小就设定了贫富悬殊的鸿沟，使贫家出身的孩子，在自己毫无选择之时，就要接受命运的安排，荒失了奠定人生基础的最重要时刻，输在起跑线上，从此走上一条比其他同辈都更坎坷的人生道路。而政府又将为此付上多大的社会代价？

《海峡时报》报道45国幼儿教育排名的新闻时候说这如暮鼓晨钟，“叫新加坡快点醒来”。政府的首长们可说也为这个报告书感到揪心。

李显龙总理随即在８月26日的国庆群众大会上指出“虽然新加坡99%的孩子接受学前教育，这个行业不断发展，但是仍然做得不够。” 他宣布政府不久将成立新法定机构，改善学前教育素质，并将投入可观的资源，“扮演更积极的角色”。

他强调 “我们的目标是让所有学生都处在同一个起跑点，这将对他们未来的发展起着正面的影响，特别是对来自弱势家庭的孩子。”

幼儿教育没有受到太大关注

新加坡因为国小，没有天然资源，亏不起在时间、人力和金钱方面的耗损，做什么都要立竿见影。现实主义、务实主义成了这个小地方处事的特色。教育的发展，经常也以解决市场需求为第一考量。幼儿教育一向没有受到关注，这从政府历年拨款不多可见。政府是从1983年开始为托儿所提供财务援助计划（Financial Assistance Scheme）。1988年颁布托儿所法令和托儿所管制法令。

幼儿教育在新加坡一向是私人企业，不列进正规教育系统里面。非政府学校的民间团体办幼稚园是有的，建国总理李光耀在儿子李显龙两三岁之时，就把他送进南洋女子中学附属的幼稚园学习，让他从小在一个具有浓郁华族文化的环境里成长。那是接近60年前的事。

上世纪六七十年代，新加坡工业化的进程需要大量妇女出外工作，和政府有紧密连系的人民行动党各支部和职工总会合作社才接过这个重任。我们可从本刊这期访问符喜泉的谈话，了解当初她领导一群妇女怎样从零开始，撰写托儿服务发展历史的过程。

七十年代末政府为了协助华文小学招生，曾开办五岁至六岁，小一前一年的“启蒙班”，大受家长欢迎。后来启蒙班结束，虽以预备班取代，仍然在九十年代初停办。

其后职总专门照顾幼儿的优儿学府合作社和人民行动党社区基金会，成为提供幼儿教育的“主要业者”，接受政府津贴来照顾幼儿。他们是新加坡幼儿教育的“最大”、“最主要”的业者，占托儿所的20%和半数幼稚园，其他则由和政府没有关系的私人企业经营。

新加坡政府管理幼儿教育一直“兵分两路”。托儿所由社会及家庭服务部处理，幼稚园事务由教育部处理。这两个政府部门并没有实际经营幼儿教育。幼儿教育的课程框架或素质标准，是踏进21世纪知识型经济，教育部才拟定。也直到今年初，教育部才宣布从明年起几年内开办15所教育部的幼稚园。

目前新加坡托儿所有1051所，这个数目与日俱增，未来五年将增200所。至于幼稚园数目，则在逐渐减少，去年有498所。有越来越多幼稚园转为托儿所，提供全日托儿服务。

幼儿教育交由私人企业经营，面对无论组屋或私人房产幼儿园租金的狂涨，私人业者必须把费用转嫁家长成了普遍的现象。2008年政府为了鼓励生育，把对职业妇女的托儿津贴从150元增至300元，仍然停止不了学费的狂飙。即便政府近年再给低收入家庭补助津贴与额外津贴，还有很多夹心层的家庭无缘受助。

私人业者把教育当一盘生意来经营，是无可厚非。但是要赚钱，付得了狂涨的租金，自然无法兼顾教师素质。没有证书资格的教师，还有已经取得证书资格的教师的素质是否真正达标，已是许多业者规避的课题。而要兼顾租金狂涨和高素质教师合理的待遇，以及完善学习环境的业者，必须向家长收取天价，已无可避免。

学费决定素质

新加坡幼儿教育来到“学费决定素质”的地步 ，家长意识到天价高的学费代表天价高的素质，素质和学费必须从中作出选择，这委实让家长吃不消。从55元到2000元学费的差价，是让人咋舌的，它以实际数字展示出新加坡的贫富悬殊。有多少孩子因此败下阵来，跨不进幼儿园这道高门槛，而与幼儿教育无缘？

当议员们纷纷在国会，向政府提出学前教育学费太高，政府如果不强制推行学前教育的话，一些孩子将失去接受学前教育的机会，“以致在人生的开头就输在起跑线上”的时候，2010年1月，教育部前任部长黄永宏在国会就议员的提问回答说：“把学前教育纳入全国教育体系，会被‘同质化’，以致过度强调教学法和课程，变成正规教育的一部分......世界上许多国家都没有把学前教育列入正规教育。”表示新加坡政府不会把学前教育列入正规教育。

幼儿教育的问题，直到去年6月，当经济学人信息部的“世界学前教育排名榜”把新加坡排名第29，“素质”栏目，还把新加坡排到从前面数来第30，从后面倒数第15的时候，才真的为新加坡政府敲起了警钟，警觉到不好好地正视幼儿教育这个课题，国家将为这个忽视付上太大代价。

连氏基金总裁李宝华受访，对本刊透露说，调查公布后，财政部行动最敏捷，他们要求连氏基金联系几位经济学家，就幼儿教育这个专题去给部里做报告。

兼任财政部长的副总理尚达曼在今年3月宣布2013年的财政预算案时，加进了将在未来五年，拨款30亿元来发展学前教育，这是比过去增加超过一倍的预算。他说，这是“为家长提供高素质和负担得起的托儿服务，不让孩子输在起跑线上。”

新法定机构“幼儿培育署”在今年4月1日正式成立，在署长李东瑾博士带领团队为新加坡幼儿教育大展鸿图之际，她接受本刊访问，以经济学家宏观的视野，宽阔的角度，从教育、社会、经济多层面，为新加坡的幼儿教育描绘了一个值得众人期待的前景。

4月24日她接受本刊访问，很快，就看到她带领的团队坐言起行。6月13日，组屋区托儿所已经在幼儿培育署的协助下，采用新的竞标模式。竞标价格已经不再是惟一考量，业者的收费、表现、课程和师资的质量，还有能给低收入家庭的援助等等都列进得标的考虑范围。6月27日则公布了欢迎更多业者加入“主要业者计划”的细节。

本刊预期还有更多的新政策将陆续出台。

正如幼儿专家徐碧琪受访时说，新加坡政府是全世界 “最关心人民的政府，他们会为人民做很好的部署。不管人民相信与否，政府是会听取民意的。” 在幼儿教育这一块，2012年新加坡只“考”到29名，倒数16名的成绩，但是很快，新加坡会迎头赶上！因为，新加坡既没有不竞争的本钱，也没有懈怠的本钱！