Chan Chun Sing
Singapore
“Since 2002, the Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) has worked with the autonomous universities (AUs) to establish arrangements that minimise disruption to National Servicemen (NSmen) who are pursuing full-time studies up to the undergraduate level, while meeting the Singapore Armed Forces' (SAF's) operational and training needs.”
“Secondments help to build up the range of competencies and work experiences of public officers to strengthen their longer-term employment relevance and resilience. The Public Service Division's guideline to agencies is to support public officers even while they are on secondment.”
“The priority of our National Servicemen must be their military duties and operational training, to meet the Singapore Armed Forces's (SAF's) operational requirements.”
“In January 2026, I had informed this House that the Government had convened an independent committee to conduct a review of the political salary framework that was laid out in 2012. The Committee has completed the review and submitted its recommendations to the Government in April.”
“All countries seek to develop mutually beneficial partnerships, and the United States-Indonesia Major Defence Cooperation Partnership is one such example.”
“Since the Singapore Armed Forces Volunteer Corps (SAFVC) was established in 2014, over 1,500 men and women have completed training and served as SAFVC Volunteers (SVs). Presently, there are about 1,100 in-service SVs, comprising 52% male and 48% female. About seven in 10 of our in-service SVs are new Citizens or Permanent Residents.”
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“Mdm Speaker, the Early Childhood Development Agency (ECDA) monitors infant care demand and works with the preschool Anchor Operators to increase the supply of places in areas of high demand. Between August 2013 and July 2014, ECDA added more than 320 infant care places across 25 childcare centres. In expanding infant care and child care supply, the availability of manpower is one challenge. ECDA is taking steps to facilitate the recruitment of more infant educarers. For Page: 19 example, the agency organised an Early Childhood Career and Education Fair in May this year. The event attracted more than 1,000 jobseekers, of which 20% were interested in educarer positions. ECDA has also worked with the Singapore Workforce Development Agency to introduce a traineeship programme for those interested in jobs in the early childhood sector. Trainees will receive a training allowance for the 40 to 80 hours traineeship, and further incentives if they complete the programme and remain in the sector. Twenty preschool operators have come on board the programme since its commencement on 1 July 2014. In addition, there are Singapore Workforce Skills Qualifications courses for infant educarers that provide mid-career entrants or back-to-work women the flexibility to work in childcare centres while undergoing training. Placement and funding support are available to eligible trainees and centres. There are 160 trainees currently enrolled in these courses. Er Dr Lee Bee Wah (Nee Soon): Thank you, Mdm Speaker. I have one supplementary question. Every week during my Meet-the-People Sessions (MPS), I have residents who come and ask for help. They have been putting their children on the waiting list of childcare centres. It looks like there is an acute shortage.”
“Madam, I do not think it is ECDA's policy to encourage people to pursue degrees and I do not think we have ever discussed this in my Ministry. As what we mentioned, what we want is to have people who are appropriately trained, adequate for their jobs and not whether they have a degree or a diploma per se. In fact, today, the vast majority of early childhood educators do not need a degree to be in the sector. And I think we all know that what we are looking for in the early childhood sector are people who can relate to children, people who can care and have the heart for them. A degree may neither be necessary or sufficient in itself. I do not think we will have a policy to say that you must have a degree in order to be an early childhood educator. But, of course, having said that, for those who would like to upgrade themselves to take on positions with larger job scopes, then if they are found appropriate, we will provide the necessary support for them to upgrade themselves, whether they go for advanced diploma or any other qualifications as necessary.”
“Madam, today, the required qualification for pre-school teaching is a certificate or a diploma in early childhood care and education, which equips preschool teachers with relevant knowledge and competencies to perform their role. The large majority of early childhood educators in the sector, from new teachers to senior teachers and centre leaders, hold a diploma. The Early Childhood Development Agency (ECDA) does not impose a degree as a requirement. In line with the Applied Study in Polytechnic and ITE Review (ASPIRE) Committee's recommendations, ECDA is working with early childhood operators and practitioners to define the competencies required for different jobs at different levels. With this, we will be able to develop better career progression pathways and continuing professional development programmes for early childhood educators throughout their careers. It will also enable operators to better tie the remuneration of their staff to job size and performance, rather than whether they have a degree or a diploma. Page: 18”
“The National Council of Social Service (NCSS) allocates dates for flag days and issues fundraising permits to its voluntary welfare organisation (VWO) members. Every year, there are more applicants than the number of available flag days and open balloting is used to allocate the slots. To encourage VWOs to make full use of each flag day and permit, NCSS has a requirement for applicants to achieve an average of $50,000 over three flag days. In practice, NCSS has exercised flexibility and granted waivers to many applicants that did not meet the requirement so that they could continue to ballot for available flag day slots.”
“St John’s home is on a 30-year lease, expiring on 31 December 2015. We understand the Home would like to continue operating at the same location. The Government is supportive of a three-plus-three-years tenancy for St John's Home upon lease expiry. This would provide continuity for the elderly residents.”
“The Special Needs Saving Scheme (SNSS) was launched in 2012 to enable parents to provide a steady income for the long-term care of their special needs children. As of June 2014, there are 199 persons with disabilities on the scheme. The majority (84%) are between one and 20 years old (Please refer to Table 1). Persons on the scheme will receive a monthly sum, rather than a lump sum, from their parents' CPF savings upon their parents' demise. At this point in time, none of them has started receiving disbursements. Page: 130”
“For the 2001 to 2005 birth cohorts, parents had six years to open and save into the CDAs. Of these cohorts, 3% of the children do not have CDAs. For the 2006-2013 cohorts, so far 5% of the children do not have CDAs. As parents now have 12 years to open up and save in the CDA, we expect the percentage without CDA to fall over time as seen in Table 1. Information on parents who saved up to the maximum cap and those who also fully used the savings is provided at Table 2. As there is now a longer period to save in the CDA, we expect the percentage for the 2006-2013 cohorts to rise over time. Page: 155 Eighty-five percent of CDA funds used have been for educational expenses, such as childcare centre and kindergarten fees. The remainder has been used for healthcare related expenses as seen in Table 3.”
“Okay, let us take a step back on this one. I think when the scheme was conceived, the aim of the scheme was to encourage families to save up for their children. So, I think that remains a relevant policy objective, which is to encourage families to save up for their children. Having said that, of course, we understand that some of the lower-income families may not have the ability to save up, and we will have to use other policy instruments and community help schemes to help them, encourage them to save up. But I am not sure, because of that, we want to do away with the entire co-savings scheme. I am not sure about that. For every policy intent and policy instrument, generally, we know that if you have one policy intent, you need a policy to do that, and it is very difficult for us to achieve many policy intents through one instrument. So, in this particular case where lower-income families are unable to save up as much, I think we should look at how we can help them to save up. But the philosophy of getting the families, to encourage the families to save, I think that remains Page: 38 relevant and that should be our objective.”
“Sorry, can I clarify the Member's query? He wants to raise the interest rates and wants to do away with the co-matching? What exactly is the solution?”
“Mdm Speaker, first and foremost, let me clarify. There is usually a period of time given for various families to top up the account to enjoy the co-savings programme by the Government. So, for some of the more recent cohorts, it would be too premature for us to say that they do not fully top up the amount because they still have some time to go before their top-up actually ceases. For those earlier batches, the usual reasons are awareness and ability. So, for both awareness and ability, we have to tackle the issues head on. For awareness, we enlist the help of all the community partners to go out and let the families know about such a scheme. For ability, that is where community efforts like the OCBC Starter Scheme comes in very useful, because for every $50 that some of these low-income families save over a six-month Page: 37 period, OCBC will contribute $100 at the end of the period. On top of that, the Government will do a matching one-for-one, up to $150 in this account.”
“Mdm Speaker, since 2001, close to 300,000 Child Development Accounts (CDAs) have been opened for Singaporean children. From 2001 to 2013, the Government had disbursed $1.4 billion of co-savings into the CDAs. MSF does not track the opening, matching and usage of CDAs by housing type. The Ministry is mindful that low-income families face more challenges in opening and depositing savings into the CDAs of their children. We work through touchpoints, such as the Social Service Offices and Family Service Centres, to encourage these families to save up for their children. We also support initiatives by the community, such as the OCBC Starter Scheme, which contribute additional funds into the child's CDA to help low-income families kick-start their CDA savings. We encourage more such initiatives.”
“The Early Childhood Development Agency will implement a common regulatory framework in childcare centres and kindergartens and undertake developmental initiatives to raise the quality of preschool services. MSF will work with community partners to strengthen marriages and preserve the family unit. We will also introduce support programmes for couples considering or undergoing divorce, and ensure that the affected children's needs and concerns are given due consideration. Much of the task of providing family and social services is shouldered by the social service sector and its dedicated professionals. MSF will help the sector expand capacity and raise capability to deliver effective and coordinated services. We will invest in manpower development and organisational capability building of social service agencies. We will promote the wider use of technology to improve productivity and service delivery. We will also extend more funding and support to voluntary welfare organisations to improve their human resource and volunteer management. We will need to strengthen professional development among our social service practitioners and provide them with fulfilling career prospects. We will achieve this by extending career and professional development opportunities to social workers, therapists, psychologists, counsellors, early intervention teachers and family life educators. We will also provide principals, teachers and edu-carers in preschools with better professional development and more rewarding careers. Together with the National Council of Social Service, we will intensify efforts to groom the next generation of social service leaders who have the breadth and depth of experience to lead the sector for tomorrow's challenges. Page: 53”
“We will strengthen our service and legal frameworks to better protect and care for vulnerable members among our growing elderly population and Singaporeans with special needs. This will include distinct roles for different stakeholders – community and grassroots in detecting needs and providing neighbourly support, VWOs in providing caregiver support and social work intervention and possibly legislation to intervene early in cases of abuse and neglect. We will also strengthen services to better protect other vulnerable groups in our society. These include having more options to support children who require care and protection, as well as raising the standards of facilities for persons who need residential care. We will develop more early intervention measures for children from disadvantaged backgrounds and provide better support for families with multiple needs. For example, we will work Page: 52 towards supporting these families and raise developmental prospects for their children through a whole-of-Government approach via better coordination and integration. For persons with disabilities, we will expand capacities in early intervention programmes and post-school care. We will also improve work and transport options and long-term financial assurance. The family remains the basic building block of our society. Under the Family Matters! initiative, MSF will work with our partners to ensure Singapore remains a great home for families. To support parents in dual income families with limited caregiving support, MSF will improve the accessibility and affordability of preschool services.”
“Singapore's social services will need to evolve in the coming years to meet the challenges of ageing demographics, changing family structures and rising public expectations. To provide greater support and assurance for Singaporeans and their families, MSF will focus on building integrated social service system, developing new services for the future and expanding capacity and deepening capability in the sector. MSF will play a stronger role in harnessing the contributions and capabilities of different partners – community groups, Voluntary Welfare Organisations (VWOs) and Government agencies – to build an integrated social service system that serves the social needs of Singaporeans. We will strengthen linkages among different social service providers to improve last mile delivery. This will include mobilising the community to develop local solutions, building up the network of Social Service Offices to deliver social assistance and conduct local service planning, and coordinating with Family Service Centres and other agencies to provide a range of specialist social service interventions. We will also strengthen coordination across Government agencies to deliver integrated social services to citizens. The Ministry will complete the network of Social Service Offices across the island by end 2015 to bring social assistance closer to residents. We will develop and progressively roll out the Social Service Net – an integrated information sharing and case management system across various social service providers. This will enable citizens to receive more timely and seamless assistance and facilitate the planning of social services to meet emerging social needs. MSF will proactively shape family and social services to keep pace with emerging needs and trends.”
“The Singapore Preschool Accreditation Framework (SPARK) was introduced in 2011 as a voluntary accreditation scheme to help raise the quality of our preschools. It also serves as a quality benchmark for parents when choosing a preschool for their child. Today, one in six preschools are SPARK-certified. One in four kindergartens and one in seven childcare centres are certified. Anchor operators are leading the sector in terms of having their centres SPARK-certified. Among existing anchor operator kindergartens and childcare centres, more than one-third are SPARK-certified. These centres make up two-thirds of all SPARK-certified preschools. Going forward, ECDA will continue in its efforts to encourage more centres to be SPARK-certified. We have taken steps to make SPARK assessment more accessible to centre leaders and teachers. First, a SPARK Information Pack has been developed and distributed to all centres to help centres understand SPARK better. Second, additional and targeted training for centres will be conducted on key quality areas assessed under SPARK. Page: 128”
“MSF registers Student Care Centres (SCCs) which administer the ComCare Student Care Subsidies. MSF tracks the availability of student care places at these centres to gauge demand and take-up rate. We will look into how to make the information more widely available for parents who are looking for available places for their children. Page: 94”
“Mdm Speaker, I think this incident is rather unprecedented. Various members of the ASEAN community have tried their best to provide assistance that would be useful to the Malaysians and the other parties involved in the search. For the ASEAN community, we do share tracks especially in shipping. Our Information Fusion Centre at Changi provides information to the shipping community on all the available information for shipping. We also have foreign liaison officers working with us in the Changi Information Fusion Centre to share such information.”
“First of all, let us extend our deepest sympathies to the families and loved ones of the passengers and crew of MH370. Our thoughts are with them during this difficult time. On 8 March 2014, when news of the disappearance of flight MH370 first broke, MINDEF deployed our C-130 aircraft to assist in the Singapore Rescue Coordination Centre's search and locate efforts in the South China Sea. The C-130 aircraft arrived at the search area at about 2.00 pm that same day. Minister Ng Eng Hen also spoke with his counterpart, Malaysian Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, to see what else we could do to help. We subsequently deployed a Victory-class Missile Corvette (RSS Vigour), a Formidable-class frigate (RSS Steadfast) with a Sikorsky S-70B naval helicopter embarked, as well as a submarine support and rescue vessel (MV Swift Rescue) with divers on board to assist the search efforts in the South China Sea. Our Chief of Defence Force and Service Chiefs have also been in close touch with their Malaysian counterparts. When the search and locate efforts expanded to the Malacca Strait, we further deployed a Fokker-50 Maritime Patrol Aircraft to Butterworth Air Base, Malaysia, to assist in the search efforts in the Malacca Strait. When the search efforts were shifted to the Indian Ocean, we activated our Navy's Information Fusion Centre to reach out to its network of navies and shipping companies to report on any sightings in the new search areas. Relevant information received was then conveyed to the search coordinators in Malaysia and Australia.”
“Madam, three quick answers. On the first question about extension to the professionals – anyone who is involved in the social service profession will qualify. We look at the social service professionals, not the organisation that they come from. So, it is the social service professionals. Two, on the IT upgrade. Our first phase of focus is on building the database for the people involved in social work per se. I am not sure about the non-profit organisations that are not involved in social work. So, I think they probably will not have that in the first phase, because the first phase is really to build up something akin to MOH's medical records, for us to provide more integrated help to the people who require social services. Third, yes, we agree that for all special needs people, we have to deal with them as individuals, and we have to look at each and every of their abilities to see how best we can help them. And I always remember this word that one late special needs person told me: "Don't look at people with disability – spelt 'disability'. Look at them with ‘this ability'." Because of that, we are able to appreciate what they can do and not what they cannot do.”
“On the first clarification, some of these modules will be incorporated into the continuing professional development courses that many of the childcare professionals go to. I have consulted many of the operators and professionals in the sector. In the past, we focused our professional development on how to teach better and how to relate to the child better. But the Member is right. Many of them have given feedback that these are necessary, but we need to go even one step further. That one step further is to provide the emotional support and the counselling skills for the childcare service professionals, to get the centre's support for them to manage some of these stresses. One of the biggest challenges that they have highlighted to me is not the stress dealing with the children. It is the stress managing a small group of parents that takes up a disproportionate amount of their time. Even parent management skills, parent-teacher relationship building, are subjects that we will incorporate into the new curriculum for our teachers. On the second point about SPARK, yes, indeed, that is the reason why we wanted to simplify the entire framework. Over time, as we increase the capacity Page: 50 in the sector, we will be able to more clearly delineate the teaching track from the professional management track. Not very different from what MOE has done over all these years with more resources. Teachers are able to focus on the teaching and, yet, we have other people to complement their work in terms of administration, quality control and so forth. Those will be the things that we will be working on in the coming years.”
“The second thing about student care, the Minister for Education has already announced the plan. We all want to do it faster, but we must not compromise the quality of care for our students. As we expand the number of student care places, we must correspondingly look at the number of teachers and volunteers that we can mobilise to do this. It is a big change that we have undergone in the last five to 10 years. As I have mentioned, five years ago, it was one in six families that did not have extensive family support. Five years later, one in three. Five more years later, one in two. Yes, we will do our best to meet this demand. But I must caution that it is not a one-for-one translation from childcare to student care. It is not a Page: 49 one-for-one demand because some people when they finish childcare and go to Primary school, there may be other alternative arrangements. Yet, there will be other people who may need new arrangements. So, it is not a one-for-one demand. I can assure Mr Yee Jenn Jong that the Minister for Education and I are both looking very closely at this. Moving forward, we want to put in place a structured and quality framework for student care services, so that we can give our parents peace of mind when they put their children in the centre.”
“Madam, on the first question by Mr Yee on KiFAS, all new anchor operators are eligible for this. They are in the process of setting up their centres and we will have to see how many centres they are able to set up and will qualify. Let me go back to a more fundamental point about how we give out subsidies and for what reasons. That is even more important. All subsidies are public money. We can only give out subsidies and use public money if we can assure ourselves of a few things, and we need to put in place these before we give out the subsidies. One, the subsidies should be targeted at those most in need of help. Two, the subsidies should not lead to a situation of price escalation without a corresponding change in quality. Three, there must be some assurance of the quality standards of the institutions that enjoy the subsidies. These form our basic philosophy. Will we expand the scheme? Let us do it carefully. Let us make sure that whoever we give the subsidies to – both in terms of operators and in terms of the parents – meet those criteria that I have just suggested. One, it is targeted at those who are most in need of help, not just to get the next better, or perceived to be better, course for our children. Two, it must not lead to an issue of price escalation without a corresponding quality increase. Three, there must be some quality assurance. All anchor operators who pass our quality assurance will be entitled to join the scheme. I have gotten feedback from some anchor operators that they will be expanding the number of centres that provide such services. I welcome that. But I will need to put in place that quality framework and ensure that the subsidies are well used and well targeted.”
“That is, they have children; they have people who are family members who are able to help them. But very often, there is a breakdown in the family relationship. Very often, before we can even do that handout, we Page: 47 have to mediate and try to get the family members to come and join us in this work. Very often, sadly, we are not always successful to get the family to come and play their part. For some of these cases, we have no choice but to come in to help. Our ultimate aim is not for these family members to outsource their responsibilities to someone else but to help the family to reconcile, so that they can help take care of each other. I am sure many Members will know that this is very challenging work. Sometimes, we run a risk. Because we are helping and these very unfilial family members know that we are helping, they harden their hearts. It is a very difficult thing, but it requires a fine balance of judgement in how best to help these families in need.”
“Madam, the answer to Dr Lily Neo's first question is yes, definitely, which is why we started the vulnerable families pilot, which is why we started the SSOs. As the Member has said, we want each case to be managed according to their needs. What the Member has also mentioned very importantly is this: it is not just the cash payout that is important. What is most important is to solve the underlying issues: Is it one of holding down a job? Is it one of health issue? Housing issue? Education? And so forth. This is the reason why the SSO has taken upon itself to do the case management for the community. This is the reason why we want to start the vulnerable families pilot with 500 families as the pilot in the first place to allow the different agencies, including MND, MOE, Police and so forth, to come together to look at the specific issues faced by the individual or family; to help them stabilise their situation, and then they move out from there. Our long-term goal is not to have more and more people on the ComCare scheme. Our long-term goal is to have ComCare act as a bridge for them to get to a better future. On the second issue: that has already been ongoing for a very long while. First and foremost, we see whether the person qualifies for public assistance. If the person qualifies for Public Assistance and if the person has CPF, we will then just top up the difference. If the person does not qualify for Public Assistance, we will then look into why they did not qualify for Public Assistance. Is it because they have family support? Or is it that they have other sources of income? We will look through the cases, but one of the very difficult challenges that we always face in such issues is that they do have what we call family support in the traditional sense.”
“Madam, let me say that not all officers in the SSOs are social work trained. SSO officers go through our in-house training to provide the basic level of social assistance and care. Some of my SSO officers are social work trained, for example, the General Manager of the SSO at Chua Chu Kang. She is social work trained. We have different people with different capabilities in the SSOs. On the Member's second suggestion, indeed, this has already been done. The upstream work with the HDB to make sure that we get alerted to those cases whereby the families are in arrears for a prolonged period, and we can render them the assistance before they run into deeper trouble.”
“SSOs are not staffed with all social workers; many of them are social assistance professionals. Then, we have the FSCs to provide social service intervention; next, we have the specialised FSCs looking after family violence, gambling, elderly abuse and so forth. And then there is the fifth ring, which represents the institutional homes that look after cases like the destitute, child abuse and so Page: 45 forth. 1.30 pm That is not the end of the social service chain because whoever ends up at the institutions and homes, they need to be re-integrated back into the community, which is why the community receptacle is so important for us to complete this loop. I hope I have broadly and simply explained the roles played by the different agencies across the entire social service chain.”
“The second ring is the SSOs. The SSOs deal with the more straightforward cases and, very often, financial cases. But the SSOs are also the first port of call for many of these families with emerging issues. The SSOs will be able to link up the families in need with the more specialised agencies to do intervention work. The SSOs will be the first one to do the triage in this entire system. The third ring is the Family Service Centres (FSCs). They are staffed with many professional social workers and counsellors. They do social work intervention for many of the complex cases. Together with the SSOs, they sit down together with the agencies, the Government agencies, to work out each and every respective case management for the families in need; from HDB to MOE to MOM for jobs and so forth because their job is to provide that holistic and integrated support. So, between the SSOs and the FSCs – especially the FSCs – they will provide the specific intervention. The fourth ring is the specialised FSCs. There are some specialised FSCs that deal with specialties or niche areas, for example, elderly abuse, gambling addiction, or PAVE for family violence. These are the specialised FSCs that work beyond the teamwork of the normal FSCs. Today, we have about 43 FSCs. We have a handful of FSCs that specialise in some of these areas: TRANS Safe Centre, PAVE and Thye Hua Kwan Moral Society for gambling addiction. The last ring represents the institutions. These are the homes – the destitute homes and the juvenile homes – that are run by the Government as part of our statutory duties. So, there are five rings of intervention – from the first line of support at the community, to the SSOs doing the simple intervention.”
“Madam, on the first issue of adult disability, let me say that I know and I agree that we have a gap, especially for the moderate to severe disability group. In the last two years, through the Member's efforts and the efforts of many of the VWOs – we have taken a step in that direction by tackling the mild to moderate adult disability group first. We are very lacking in our support and expertise to manage this group. This is something that we want to grow so that we can provide better support for the families with adult disability, especially the severe to the moderate ones. We have taken a step in that direction by going in to the moderate to mild group first because, admittedly, that is easier and we need to build up our capacity and capability. Today, we do not yet have enough specialists in this area but we are committed to expand the group. On the second issue about the SSOs' role versus FSCs and grassroots leaders (GRLs), maybe the best way that I can illustrate this is what I usually say at some of the sharing sessions with the communities. Imagine a five-ring Page: 44 Olympic ring in the social service chain. The first ring is a community ring. The community is the first line of support, the first line of detection. This is where we want to mobilise more community groups to provide that integration. This is where PA, this is where CDCs, and many other kind-hearted individuals come in because they mobilise the community support group. This community support group is important not just for the social service. In time to come, this community support structure will have to extend to taking care of our elderly and even some of the mentally unstable partners in our community. So, this is a community group. The PA, CDCs and GRLs are working hard on this.”
“But there are other packages that incentivise or help promote family formation and those have a separate policy objective. From the child's perspective, we want to be fair to the child. I understand that the child is innocent and there is no reason for us to discriminate against the child. We will take note of the suggestions on divorce counselling, whether we should push up the age limit. We have just started this; let us take a step at a time and see if it works well and then whether there is a further need for us to raise the age. I would just want to say that adults can often get into trouble, disagree, but let us always remember the child who is always at the centre, Page: 43 caught in between, powerless to dictate terms or even to share his or her perspective. So, for all parents, I always urge them to always put the child's interests at heart, no matter what difficulties there may be between the adults.”
“Madam, I thank Mr Seah Kian Peng for his clarifications. On the first issue, I think there is no easy solution to this. And I would like to follow up with what Ms Denise Phua mentioned yesterday. Those who genuinely want to help – never mind if they post the story on the Internet or what not – we will be most happy to work with them. But for those with other reasons why they want to do such things, it is always difficult. On my part and on my Ministry's part, we are committed to protecting the privacy and confidentiality of the respective cases that we are handling. So, yes, sometimes we do take the flak but we would rather take the flak than sacrifice the confidentiality of the beneficiaries whom we are helping. Maybe this is part and parcel of our job. But I just want to reassure the House that if you come across any case, whether it is on the Internet or in the newspapers, we will chase up on the case. Very often, these are cases which we have been dealing with for many years. The example that I gave you just now is more than eight years, and we are still trying to help him. On the second issue, I just want to reassure Mr Seah Kian Peng that MND has very kindly moved on the singles issue. Unwed single mums with children are now eligible to apply for a flat very much as any other singles. For specific cases where the circumstances are exceptional, I am sure the Minister for National Development will look at it with compassion and assess it, as he would do in his usual way. For financial support, our policy is to never discriminate the child because of the parents' marital status. For all things that we give to the Singaporean child, it will be the same.”
“We all have our share of volunteers at our Meet-the-People Session (MPS) who are not satisfied with managing cases at our MPS. They go that extra mile to do what we call "mobile MPS"; we do not just worry about those people who come to look for us; we worry more about those people who cannot come and may not know how to come. Very often, these MPS helpers, when they go on their rounds, they find out more issues that are required to be resolved than meet the eye. All these are examples that come to my final point about the success and failure of our social service system in Singapore. It is all about people, people and people. People are at the heart of what we do and people are also the key reason why we are able to do what we do. I thank all Members of the House for Page: 41 your support, for the challenging work in MSF. I can only promise you that we will take in all your suggestions and your words of encouragement and your words of admonishment to try and do better in the coming years. Thank you very much.”
“Mobilising the community resources, integrating the work of the SSOs, FSCs and the other VWOs in the respective communities to deliver Page: 40 localised and integrated services so that each and every community will get the special attention that is required for the respective communities to take ownership of the challenges that they have, to take care of the respective families in need that we have within our community. But all these are but policies and organisations. Ultimately, what makes or breaks the system will be people. Let me just recount three little episodes that just came to me last week. Last week, I received a letter. The letter-writer said he saw a seemingly homeless person in the north-western part of Singapore – a Chinese man, seemingly homeless, with his bag of belongings, looking a bit haggard. And then he said he saw an Indian lady going up to this old man, trying to speak to him in Hokkien to try to understand if he was, indeed, homeless. 1.15 pm The old man ignored her but the lady kept trying. After many rounds, the lady asked the letter-writer to help keep an eye on the old man and to translate. Finally, she moved on, after she was satisfied that he was not a homeless person. After that and many episodes later, I found out this lady happened to be one of my officers on her off-day visiting her relative. I was very proud of her. It was her day off. She was not a social service officer by name. But she had it in her DNA to keep a look out for fellow countrymen in need. Likewise, I was very proud of one of my VWO officers, and there are many of them, who brought in a young lady who was having self-harm behaviour at 11.00 pm at night, stayed with her all the way until 5.00 am in the hospital and police station to stabilise her case.”
“Very happy for individuals like Ms Zaqia, who after many years as an edu-carer, went on to take up her diploma and continue to upgrade herself, not because she wanted higher pay, but because she desires to do better for the children under her charge. Let me now round up the discussion on MSF's work and recap some of the areas that we will focus on this year. Three things, and only three things, that we will want to do well and do better this year. The first is to work hand-in-hand with many agencies upstream – MND, MOE, MOM and all other agencies, so that we minimise the number of issues downstream, as many of you have suggested. And indeed, we have started this journey with the many agencies. Today, before a new precinct is built by HDB, all the social needs will be incorporated into the designs upfront, down to the level whereby in 20 years' time, when we have an ageing population, there is a place for our elderly to gather, to socialise, to build networks. This is the attention to detail that we must put in place now for the future. As I have mentioned at the beginning of this debate, our social safety net is not dependent just on MSF's efforts. The strongest social safety net that we can provide for fellow Singaporeans is to make sure that we have a strong system of education providing them with good jobs, meaningful jobs, providing them with good housing, affordable housing, quality housing, affordable healthcare, quality healthcare. These are all the upstream work that we are committed to do. This year, the sequence of the Budget debate is perhaps a small reflection of this desire for us to work closer together to achieve our aim to better take care of all Singaporeans. The second thing that we will do is to make sure that we have effective last-mile delivery.”
“But in order to do this, we understand and appreciate the manpower challenges in the existing system, which is why we are building up a pool and database of relief teachers very much like the MOE system so that we can provide time off and opportunities for our teachers to go for training and upgrading. Having done all these, may I also urge parents to work closely with our teachers? Our teachers are very committed to what they do but they need the support of our parents. We have many positive examples of parents working closely together with the teachers. When I visited the centre in Punggol, they told me how they mobilised the parents to come in and help the teachers to take care of the children, to organise activities and really build the community. Yet, at the same time, I also have my fair share of negative examples from parents who would write long letters of complaints to ECDA and demand investigations because, on a particular day, the child went home with two Page: 39 mosquito bites. It takes up time, energy from ECDA but, more importantly, it damages the relationship of trust between parents and teachers. And I want to emphasise again that every time when I talk to my teachers in the childcare sector, the first thing that they always ask is how I can strengthen their professional image and to build the trust with the parents. Those are the first things that they tell me, because they desire respect, they desire a partnership with our parents. So I am very happy to see some very good operators, like My First School at Haig Road, who, on their own initiative, came up with a systematic programme to allow their teachers to upgrade themselves.”
“When she makes a recommendation, it is often with deep insights and experience. Page: 38 We need many, many more "Ang Bee Lians" for our future challenges, and MSF is committed to making sure that the next generation of "Ang Bee Lians" will be as good, if not even better, in terms of development opportunities and exposure. We are fortunate to have Bee Lian despite the fact that we did not think about this many years back in the current terms that we talk about today. On the Early Childhood Service Sector, we will similarly pay much attention to the development of our early childhood professionals this year. When we talk about quantity and quality, they are actually linked together. Good quality professional development will attract good people to come and join us and enlarge our ranks. On the other hand, poor quality, poor professional image, will cost us to lose even more people from the sector, which is why the push for quantity and quality goes hand-in-hand in our plan to develop the early childhood professionals. We are going to strengthen our manpower pipeline by increasing the number of places in the Polytechnics, increasing the number of training awards and scholarships, and also supporting mid-career entrants better. We will implement the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Masterplan this year. In fact, it has already started in February this year where we have rolled out courses to strengthen the tools of our early childhood professionals. The take-up rate by the teachers and professionals has been encouraging and we will roll out more courses this year to meet the demand. We will also institute support measures from May this year where up to four days per year will be committed to Continuing Professional Development for all our teachers.”
“This is akin to what MOE is doing, where teachers are employed by MOE but they are deployed to the SPED schools and the independent schools. We have thought long and hard about this scheme and I am prepared to support NCSS and the VWOs to give it their best shot, to develop a new career scheme to complement the existing career scheme. So, NCSS will work with the many VWOs to design the scheme to centrally recruit, deploy and expose these officers to wider sectoral challenges. NCSS will be making available more information in the later part of this year. In order for us to make a breakthrough in this, everyone has to think of the sector first and not the individual VWOs. That we can do this together to pool our resources to make the sector first and foremost more attractive, more inviting for the newcomers to come and join us; that everybody will benefit because the respective officers in the VWOs will be able to benefit from the exposure across different VWOs, across different agencies, from Government agencies to NCSS, to different VWOs. We hope that this will also accelerate the sharing of ideas across different VWOs. But most importantly, we hope that in 10 to 15 years to come, we will groom a new generation of social service leaders – leaders who are not just deep in their respective professional knowledge but leaders with the breadth of expertise and exposure who can lead the entire sector. Today, my Director of Social Welfare is Ms Ang Bee Lian, a familiar name to many of you. Bee Lian is someone who commands respect in the sector because she has been through NCSS, and she has been through MSF. When she speaks, every one of us, including myself, we pay attention because of her depth of experience, because she understands what goes on across the entire sector.”
“As I have always said, our social service professionals did not join this sector because of money. But neither should we have them leave the sector because of money. We are committed to making sure that we pay them fairly and properly. Beyond the current effort to manage the people who are already with us in the sector, we have also heard feedback that requires us to think of a new approach to complement the existing approach that we are taking. Some of this feedback from the sector includes the desire for social service professionals to be cross deployed to better understand the bigger picture to build the networks across different VWOs so that they can work closer together. We also want to open up the pipeline for people to join us even if they are in their mid-career already. For the younger social workers and social service professionals, they asked if they can have a better system to manage their career development and deployment. Some want to specialise, others want to be given opportunities to understand the sector, from governance to execution, so that they can better prepare themselves to be leaders in the sector in the Page: 37 years to come. We have heard them and there is support for a new complementary scheme for us to do this. I have spoken to NCSS, and NCSS told me that, this year, they will start a new scheme, together with the many like-minded VWOs, including the big ones and the small ones. A new scheme that will recruit, develop and deploy the social sector professionals as an integrated body, where they will be centrally recruited, decentralised to the various agencies and have their careers tracked by this shared and pooled service from NCSS and the VWOs.”
“We will adopt a two-pronged approach from the feedback given to us by the sector. The first is that we will provide greater support for all professionals and leaders in the existing VWOs. We will broaden the focus from social workers to all social service professionals, because they all operate multi-disciplinary teams to help the individuals and families in need. We will open up the development opportunities to all social service professionals, including social workers, therapists, psychologists, early intervention teachers and counsellors. We are all one big family. Page: 36 1.00 pm In the short term, we will expand the professional and leadership development programmes. We will offer more postgraduate studies in a wider range of disciplines and will continue to allow our social service professionals to enjoy the Sabbatical Leave Scheme, so that they, too, can take a break from some of the very emotionally challenging work. In the longer term, we will continue to expand the pathways for the Continuing Professional Development frameworks. More details will be announced in the later part of this year. The Social Service Training Institute has been re-organised as Social Service Institute to provide more dedicated focus to the way we develop our social service sector professionals and leaders, and they will continue to expand the career pathway for the people and the professionals working in the sector. Last year, we had also done our surveys and benchmarks for the salary scales. We have widely shared with all the VWOs the benchmarks and the scales and encouraged them to revise their Human Resource framework and their salary framework. MSF, on our part, has also adjusted our funding norms to enable our VWOs to remunerate their social service professionals better.”
“Some of the support initiatives that we have now include collaboration with institutes of higher learning to run a youth social entrepreneurship programme. We also have partnership capacity builders, such as Empact, to develop and implement pilot mentorship programmes for corporate mentors to provide support for the social enterprises. The Government will continue to encourage and support our social enterprises in the years to come, and we hope that all our agencies will also give them a chance by buying their products and services to encourage them to go further. Let me now touch on the third set of priorities for MSF in 2014 and that has to be establishing the conditions for our future needs, particularly in the area of manpower capability development. Many Members in this House have spoken about the need for manpower, not just in terms of quantity but also quality. Indeed, this issue has been uppermost on my mind for the years that I have been with MSF. I have taken a lot of time, together with my staff, to talk to people in the sector, to understand the issues, but more importantly, to hear their ideas about how we can achieve a breakthrough in the way we organise and utilise our finite manpower resources. A common feedback that we have always heard about our Voluntary Welfare Organisation (VWO) sector is that they are all very small. And because they are small, it is difficult for them to have the best Human Resource practices. It is difficult for them to have a structured career development path for the social service professionals. Over the last two years, we have taken time to listen to the feedback, and to have many workshops to generate ideas to see how we can organise ourselves differently and do things better.”
“As such, we would like to work closely with the Malay/Muslim organisations to bring help to the next level for our Malay/Muslim families in need. We already have some positive examples. We want to build on them and do even better. For example, the SSO at Choa Chu Kang is working closely with the Al-Khair Mosque through a Befrienders Programme. They mobilise befrienders to make regular home visits to more than 100 beneficiaries of MUIS financial assistance and ComCare assistance. They regularly visit beneficiaries in Choa Chu Kang, Teck Whye and Yew Tee. We hope that more Malay/Muslim professionals who are successful will come forward to become mentors to the children from these vulnerable families. We need positive role models who can walk the journey with these children. We acknowledge that they cannot overcome their challenges in a day or two. We understand that this effort will take many years. Occasionally, it may also not produce results. Even so, we must still give it our best shot. We look forward to working with MENDAKI, MUIS and other Malay/Muslim organisations, so that we can together uplift Malay/Muslim families in need. Madam, I seek your permission to continue in English. (In English): Let me briefly talk about our work with the social enterprises, a point that Miss Penny Low mentioned. Today, we have 200-300 social enterprises, including cooperatives, in Singapore. The sector has grown and we hope that it will continue to grow further. MSF is indeed looking to working closely with all like-minded partners to expand this sector because of the Page: 35 important role they play, not just to provide services to the public but also the opportunities they create for our people and families in need.”
“[Please refer to Vernacular Speech.] Madam, let me first thank the Malay/Muslim community who have come forward to reach out to fellow Singaporeans in need. Since I became the Minister for Social and Family Development three years ago, I have met many Malay/Muslim leaders of Singapore who expressed concerns about the Malay/Muslim families who are vulnerable. We all understand and agree that we cannot overcome this challenge unless we provide integrated and long-term help. Beyond financial help, they will also need assistance in terms of jobs, housing, education and others. This is exactly what MSF hopes to do for our vulnerable Malay/Muslim families. We are particularly concerned with providing these families with a stable environment that their children can grow up safely and confidently. This will ensure that the children will receive a good education to improve their family's circumstances in the future. Page: 34 We will embark on a pilot effort to provide integrated assistance for these vulnerable families. The SSO Officers will also work with the ground to design local social services that are specifically catered to help these vulnerable families, including Malay/Muslim families. We hope to make a difference. But we cannot do this alone without your support. Beyond financial, housing and educational assistance, we need mentors who can understand these families, and appreciate the cultural and religious norms of these families, to help them effectively. Please do not get me wrong. I am not saying that non-Malay/Muslim social workers and volunteers cannot become mentors to Malay/Muslim families. They are already doing so now. But we also think that an added knowledge of the community's cultural and religious norms will help us become even more effective.”
“But we need many more, many more in the communities that can work Page: 33 in partnership with the SSOs, FSCs and so forth. Mr Seah Kian Peng suggested why do we not try having paid volunteers. To many, this sounds like an oxymoron – paid volunteers. Okay, let us not call it that. Let us try a different way. Indeed, we have started a pilot, also at Jalan Minyak. It was the programme called "Caring Assistance from Neighbour (CAN) Programme", an initiative between MSF and the Agency for Integrated Care (AIC), where we get the elderly who are still mobile to visit other elderly to remind them to take their medicine and to engage them, to befriend them. We also know that in Northeast Community Development Council (CDC), Mayor Teo Ser Luck has started a programme whereby families in need come not just to get the cash handout but also to do some simple tasks for the community. It is not done in exchange. It is done because they want to give the families being helped a sense of ownership, pride and dignity, that they are not just taking handouts. I think we can push further on these ideas, and MSF will be happy to work with Members and their respective communities to champion such ideas. Madam, if I may have your permission to make some remarks in Malay.”
“But we want to come together, so that we know when we need to exercise a bit more flexibility in the judgement. We want to have dedicated social workers to these families to walk those years with them, because it will take us many, many years to solve – I would not even say solve – manage some of these challenges. Progressively, as we take on the hardest cases, it will free up resources for us to take on yet more cases. We are going to change the way we want to tackle some of these most difficult cases in society. I hope that I will have Members' support for us to do this; I will urge patience because these are not cases that we can overcome in a day or two. There is a particular gap that we want to work on this year. Whenever I talk about social service, I talk about the SSOs, I talk about the FSCs and I talk about the institutional homes run by MSF. But there is one more, one more important ring in the entire social service chain, and that is the community. We need more organised community partners that can serve as the first line of defence to pick up cases which might be vulnerable and alert the SSOs, FSCs and so forth before the families get into trouble. We also need community organisations that can serve as a vehicle for families to be reintegrated back into the community. We need to grow this community ability systematically. I am happy to note that some of the communities are already starting to do this. For example, there is this group called "Friends in Charity" started informally by about 40 friends, helping the less privileged quietly since 2005, regularly distributing food, giving financial assistance, providing mentorship to children and families in Banda Street. Sometimes, they organised outings and so forth.”
“We have many years of case files in many of the FSCs and SSOs. For those of you who have visited our FSCs, you know that sometimes they look like Chinese medicine shops with rows and rows of files from the many cases that they are handling. We will progressively computerise this to make the data available to all those who are providing help. There is much work that we need to do. 12.45 pm In the meantime, may I humbly ask Members of the House: do not judge any of these families in trouble when you see a picture in the newspaper or on the Internet. Very often, there are very complicated stories behind each and every story, each and every case. Very often, the social workers and the community have been working quietly behind the scenes, helping these families in need without fanfare. Very often, the social workers might get discouraged when people start pointing fingers, asking if they had done enough. We would Page: 32 always like to do more and do better but we will all do this together. I spoke about the vulnerable families and there are some very hardcore cases that we are handling in our society, cases that are even more complex than the two that I have mentioned to you earlier. For this year, we are going to invest in a Vulnerable Families Pilot Programme. The numbers may not be big but they do take up disproportionate amount of resources in the social service sector. We are going to focus our attention on the first pilot of 500 families. We are going to bring together the various Government agencies to do integrated case management, as suggested by some Members. Each agency, whether is it the HDB, MOE, MOH or others, they might just miss the qualifying criteria.”
“One of the things that the SSO officers will do regularly and have already started in those communities they are in, is to do the Page: 31 integrated case management conference, weekly and, as necessary, to talk about all the complex cases like the one that I have shared earlier. So that different agencies can come together to share how they are helping those respective cases, and where we can do better. As Ms Denise Phua said, "so that nobody will be over served, underserved or not served", so that each and every case will get the attention necessary from the SSOs, the community, VWOs and FSCs. We will continue to do more of this and I thank all the Members for your support, because without your support, we will never be able to bring together all the stakeholders in the community to develop the localised solutions, and to deliver the integrated service for the many, many complex cases that are residing within our respective communities. But we can still do better. We are working on a database, a common database. We hope to get data with a pilot by next year, and progressively over the many years to come. We will input the data and the case histories for all the families in it. Why are we doing this? We are doing this for a very simple reason. For the people looking for help, they just need to tell their story once. For the people providing the help, they know what help has been given to the families or the individuals across the entire time span. No different from the medical history that we get when we see a doctor. So that in the future, when someone goes and sees a social service professional, they, too, will have their equivalent social history record available to them. This will make it more efficient for us. I must moderate expectations.”
“For some Members, you may have attended our sessions already where we call upon everybody from the community to come together, to sit down together, to do something very simple – get to know each other. Get to know each other to know the kind of services in the community, and to get to know the challenges in the community, so that we will be able to sit down as one community to resolve these challenges. Dr Lily Neo would have an example. In Jalan Kukoh and Jalan Minyak, the officers from the SSOs, together with the partners, walked day and night – and I mean day and night – to find out the challenges in the community. My officers told me that they needed youth guidance services. I asked them how did they know. They told me, "I know, because for the last few nights, from 12 midnight to four to five o'clock, I was there. I saw a number of youths hanging out and I talked to them and I know what is troubling them." This is the kind of thing that we want to see in our SSO officers, to have in them, within them the DNA to look at the local issues and to develop the customised solutions. With that, they are able to mobilise the Police, grassroots leaders and the VWOs to come together to tailor solutions to the local community. We will do that, and we will do more. Because for each community, we will need to get in there, spend time to find out the unique needs to develop those unique solutions. This is the first thing about the localised delivery. The second thing is about integration in delivery. As many Members have mentioned, it is not just the SSOs, the agencies or VWOs working together. We all need to work together.”
“Very often, as Ms Denise Phua has said, some people will post something on the Internet or a story may come out in the evening newspaper and so forth. Let me assure all Members of this House that my Ministry chases up on each and every story, even though it is not appropriate for us to reveal their private circumstances or the kind of help that they have been getting. Occasionally, my social workers may get frustrated and ask me why they cannot talk about their cases in public. Some of them are being helped, but they provide a different story. Some of them have very complicated situations which may not be alleviated in the short term. Our policy has never been to reveal names publicly, but our job is to continue to help these people as much as we can, for them to achieve independence, and not dependence. For them to be resilient, and not to grow their reliance. For the community and the family to Page: 30 own the problem and challenges together, and not to outsource to somebody else. This is the reason why we have set up the Social Services Offices (SSOs) across the entire island. We want to provide more integrated services, and we want to provide more localised services. Mr Seah Kian Peng, Mr Zainal Sapari and Dr Lily Neo asked about the progress of the SSOs. Since the announcement last year, to date, we have 10 SSOs fully functioning across the entire island. We will have four more by the middle of this year in Ang Mo Kio, Sengkang, Bedok and Queenstown, and we will continue to roll out the rest of the network by end 2015. One of the first thing that all the SSOs do when they go into the community is to walk the community, map out all the services in the community, identify the gaps in the community, identify the partners in the community.”
“Even until today, we have no Page: 29 good resolution for this issue, not for Mdm Lim and her habits, her housing issue, not for the care of her child. Credit goes to the home, to the FSC, to the grassroots leaders – they are still trying. The second story. Sometime back, about a year ago, I visited a family in an Interim Rental Housing flat. Hard luck story. Father used to be a taxi driver, fell into hard times, exhausted their savings, sold their flat, ended up without a home. Really difficult situation. The father was nursing his medical condition and trying to recover. The sons – one still in Polytechnic, one still in Secondary school – were trying to complete their studies. The FSC and social workers tried to stabilise the situation. They managed to get the mother a temporary part-time job while continuing to provide financial and other forms of assistance to stabilise this situation. When the elder son entered the military service as part of his NS duties, he was a very sensible man. He decided that perhaps he should sign on as a regular to alleviate the burden of his family. Over the course of six months to a year, the family managed to get out of the Interim Rental Housing that they were in. I would not claim credit for my social workers nor the FSCs. I think what made the difference was the single-minded determination of the family to get out of the situation that they were in. A very sensible young man; both sons are very sensible – I have spoken to them. The father was very determined to try to recuperate and change his lifestyle. The mother worked very hard. It is perhaps a small success. These few stories just go to show the kind of challenges that we have to deal with in many of the cases that we come across.”
“Madam, let me now continue with the second and third priorities for MSF's work in the year 2014. The second priority I want to talk about is our last-mile delivery. The third priority is establishing the conditions for our future success, in particular, our manpower development. Let me start with the second priority. As mentioned, our job is to make sure we promote independence and not dependence. Our job is to promote resilience and not reliance. Our job is to promote ownership, not outsourcing of responsibilities. Before I start, perhaps I could share two short stories with Members of this House to illustrate the kind of work and challenges we have in the sector. As a matter of policy, we do not reveal the names of people whom we help, so I will just call the first person Mdm Lim. Mdm Lim is 70 years old. She used to stay in a rental flat. She has a disabled child, about 40 years old. She refused to stay in her flat because she believed that her rental flat was haunted. She changed her adult disabled child in public, causing quite a bit of embarrassment to the passers-by, but she did not think anything was wrong with it. The grassroots leaders and the Family Service Centre have, over the years, over many years, tried to get her into a new flat. HDB was willing to help her get a new flat, but she refused. After many years of trying, the Family Service Centre (FSC), together with the grassroots leaders, finally managed to get the child into a home. But that was not the end of it. Mdm Lim did not believe that this was the best solution for the child. Mdm Lim continued to give a lot of trouble to the home who was trying to help to manage the child's condition.”
“Let me now take a break and I will ask Parliamentary Secretary, Ms Low Yen Ling, to cover the help that we will be rolling out for the other groups, for persons with disabilities, youths-at-risk and also strengthening the support for our families.”