After expansion, three Sped schools to take in 75 more students each year

SINGAPORE — Three Special Education (Sped) schools will collectively take in 75 additional students with special needs each year once their expansion plans have been completed.

The government-funded schools, which offer Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) programmes for children with moderate-to-severe ASD, are run by the Autism Association Singapore (AAS), AWWA and Rainbow Centre respectively.

The move to expand the number of special education school places comes amid an increase in the reported number of students with moderate-to-severe ASD who require specialised and intensive intervention to support their learning, the Ministry of Education (MOE) said Wednesday (May 24).

This, in turn, has led to an increase in demand for ASD programmes offered by Sped schools run by voluntary welfare organisations (VWOs).

Under the expansion plans, AAS, AWWA School and Rainbow Centre, all VWOs, will each be opening an additional campus.

AAS, which runs Eden School, will open its new campus at the site of the former Hong Kah Primary School. For AWWA School, its new campus will be at the site of fomer Bedok West Primary School.

Rainbow Centre will operate from the site of the former Si Ling Secondary School.

To enable these special schools to take in more students before the new campuses are ready, AWWA School will operate out of MINDS Fernvale Gardens School from the second half of this year, while Eden School will operate out of Chong Boon Secondary School from next year.

“MOE will continue to work with the VWOs which operate government-funded Sped schools to ensure that children with moderate-to-severe special educational needs are able to access and benefit from a quality education,” the ministry said.

Last November, the Government announced that the Compulsory Education Act would be extended to children with moderate to severe special needs from 2019. Currently, such children are exempted from compulsory education. The MOE had said then that there are about 1,770 children with special educational needs in each cohort.

Seventy-five per cent of them, who have mild special needs such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia, already attend mainstream schools. The remaining 25 per cent have moderate to severe special needs such as visual impairment, autism or multiple disabilities, and most of them attend one of the 20 government-funded Sped schools.