Wednesday, 6 December 2017

The Straits Times

This was an article contribution by Associate Professor Irene YH Ng from the Department of Social Work and Director of Social Service Research Centre at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Assoc Prof Ng discussed the longer term implications of plans to give priority primary school admission to pupils attending kindergartens operated by the Ministry of Education. She observed that this leads to a group being created that will likely be assigned a prestige label because of the ‘insiders’ benefit of priority admission. Assoc Prof Ng opined that there is a danger that the creation of a new preferential group will further segregate pupils by socio-economic status and bring the ‘arms race’ for educational success earlier to the pre-primary level, adding that such priority admission can create more intense competition among children at a young age (and their parents) and inadvertently worsen educational inequality.

Click here to read the article.