Budget 2024 > Latest > Commentary
Ms Carrie Tan (Nee Soon): SPARK certification was meant to raise the quality of preschools and it did help to ensure some standardisation and processes are in place. But are there now some side effects? Only 37.7% of preschools here are SPARK-certified. Some early childhood educators find being uncertified more beneficial as they have greater flexibility to do more for the children.
Increasing salaries in the sector has not been enough to solve the high turnover problem. The annual attrition rate of early childhood educators was five times higher than the general Ministry of Education (MOE) attrition rate. The problem is no longer about remuneration but whether the work is realistically feasible for each person to shoulder. Thirty years ago, Kindergarten 2 teachers could integrate Mother Tongue, English, art and music in creative manners to help children enjoy learning. Each class had 42 children and the kids grew up fine. I am one of them.
Now, despite class sizes being cut to 25 kids, teachers still struggle because of the sheer amount of documentation they need to submit. Lesson plans, curriculum, personal portfolio of each child, sometimes doubling up for the cooking or cleaning aunty if she is on medical leave. Changing diapers or clothes for kids who soil their pants, pulling kids apart when they are fighting and giving more attention to children with special needs. All these while making sure no child gets a scratch or a bruise, or bump their knees, which could then invite very anxious calls by parents for more accountability and more surveillance.
This cannot do. We must ensure that the sector is as much teacher-centric as it is child-centric for quality education to be sustainable. I suggest that we make SPARK Developmental Visits more frequent and random, than only once in three years; and assessors should visit centres more often to observe the classroom interactions rather than rely on a paper audit exercise. This will ensure that teachers’ attention is on the children and not on completing paperwork meticulously. I also suggest that we partner teachers, whose main job is to teach and nurture children, with a Child Development Specialist that specialises in the documentation and observation work.
Watch the speech here.