Larger childcare centres to meet needs of younger families

SINGAPORE — To meet the demand for childcare places, larger childcare centres which can house between 300 and 500 children will be built over the next few years, Social and Family Development Minister Chan Chun Sing announced today (March 13).

Once completed, these centres will be run by the anchor operators and they will add 2,400 new childcare places — on top of the 20,000 additional spots that the Government has pledged to provide between 2013 and 2017. More details on the larger childcare centres will be released later this year.

To date, 17,000 places have already been added. Speaking during the Ministry of Social and Family Development’s Committee of Supply debate, Mr Chan said the Government is ahead of schedule in its plans to increase the number of childcare places. The additional places announced today will help meet the needs of young families in estates where there are high demand, he added.

On average, childcare centres here have a capacity of about 100 children each. There are some childcare centres — run by anchor operator NTUC My First Skool and private operators Just Kids Learning Place and Etonhouse, for example — that can take in 300 to 400 children.

PAP Community Foundation (PCF), one of the five anchor operators here, said it is in discussion with the Early Childhood Development Agency (ECDA) and are waiting for the sites to be finalised. The centres have to be ready by the second half of next year, said the spokesperson for PCF, which runs 364 centres here, citing transportation as a potential challenge of running the larger centres. Nevertheless, this could be overcome by working with private transport or school bus operators.

Another challenge would be finding sufficient manpower, she said.

Despite the challenges, the bigger sites offer the opportunity for the operator to tap on the larger spaces and design a more varied programme to include, for example, science and other project-based activities, the spokesperson added.

Apart from PCF and My First Skool, the other anchor operators are MY World Preschool, Skool4Kidz and E-bridge Pre-school.

More details were also revealed today about the new Partner Operator (POP) scheme, which was first announced during the Budget statement earlier this month. The scheme aims to improve the quality and affordability of childcare centres here. Up to S$250 million will be set aside for the scheme over the next five years, In return for government funding under the scheme, operators will have to keep to a fee cap of about S$800 for full-day childcare services and ensure that future fee increases are kept affordable for parents, the Early Childhood Development Agency (ECDA) said.

They will also have to attain the Singapore Pre-school Accreditation Framework (SPARK) certification and ensure career progression opportunities for their staff in return for government funding, among other things.

“I personally think it’s good for us to have a variety of learning models at this young age,” said Mr Chan. “But on the other hand, we have to ask ourselves… is having more than 600 different brands of operators a bit too many for us to create the efficiencies of scale required for us to keep prices competitive, affordable; for us to give the best opportunities for our teachers to progress in their career?”

Together, the POP and Anchor Operator schemes are expected to serve about half of pre-school children here by 2020.

Operators who offer about 300 childcare places or more, or groups of smaller operators, were invited to submit an expression of interest to participate in the scheme. ECDA said it expects to appoint the operators under the POP scheme by the end of the year.

To raise the quality of the early childhood sector, there will also be new regulatory framework to harmonise the legislations for childcare centres and kindergartens. A new Early Childhood Development Centres Act to regulate kindergartens - which are currently registered under the Education Act - and childcare centres will be introduced in the second half of the year. It will also require the registration of all early childhood professionals.

Mr Chan said that the Government wants to help operators but only if they are not solely driven by money. “My commitment to all the operators is that the Government will help you... so long as you put the interests of our children at the forefront of all that you do. So long as you take the Government subsidy and translate this into lower fees and higher pay for the teachers,” he said. “But if the operators are in this sector for pure profit, then I must say that, you are probably in the wrong sector and … (it is) not in my job or in my interest, to help you succeed.”