STUDENTS FROM SPECIAL ASSISTANCE PLAN SCHOOLS

STUDENTS FROM SPECIAL ASSISTANCE PLAN SCHOOLS:

(Integration): 6.

Dr Fatimah Lateef asked the Minister for Education whether there are plans to further integrate students from the Special Assistance Plan schools into the wider, multicultural group of students from other schools in Singapore.

The Minister of State for Education (Mr Gan Kim Yong) (for the Minister for Education): Mr Speaker, it is always a pleasure to answer questions in the House.

The Ministry of Education established the Special Assistance Plan, or SAP schools, in 1979 for two purposes. Firstly, to keep alive the best traditions and ethos of old Chinese schools in a few selected schools, so as to inculcate traditional Chinese values and social discipline in a number of our top students. Secondly, to encourage a number of our academically able and linguistically talented students to study both Chinese and English at the first language level.

Today, our SAP schools continue to play a key role in nurturing a core group of bilingual Singaporeans who are well versed in the Chinese language and culture, with a deep understanding of their heritage, and who are also well poised to grasp opportunities in the emerging China market. This is a strength of our system that we will continue to preserve going forward.

SAP schools are keenly aware that they need to work doubly hard to create opportunities for their students to interact with students from other ethnic groups. They do so in a variety of forms - from twinning with non-SAP schools with a multi-racial composition to taking part in joint activities with non-SAP schools and community organisations which serve non-Chinese or multi-racial communities. An example is the twinning arrangement between Ai Tong School, which is a Primary SAP school, and Pierce Secondary School. Primary 4 pupils from Ai Tong who are weak in Mathematics and English receive tutoring help from non-Chinese students from Pierce Secondary. Similarly, the Secondary 3 students in Chung Cheng High School (Main) run a Conversational Chinese Programme for Primary 5 non-Chinese students from Geylang Methodist Primary School.

SAP schools also actively celebrate the different ethnic festivals and leverage on these occasions to deepen their students' understanding of other races and cultures. Non-Chinese students from neighbouring schools are invited to join in for these events. For instance, Anglican High celebrates Chinese New Year and Racial Harmony Day annually together with Damai Secondary School and Changkat Changi Secondary School.

Going forward, MOE and the SAP schools will continue to actively explore and create more opportunities for SAP students to interact with students from other ethnic groups.

Dr Fatimah Lateef: Thank you very much for the answer. I would just like to ask one supplementary question. Will there be a possibility to consider some kind of formal interactive programme or integration programme between uni-cultural schools, basically SAP schools, versus maybe perhaps madrasah schools? Because a kind of a long-term relationship between two types of schools would probably be good in developing tolerance and understanding of our multi-cultural and multi-racial society.

Mr Gan Kim Yong: Mr Speaker, Sir, the Ministry has adopted the approach of top-down support for ground-up initiatives, ie, we encourage the schools to evolve and develop their own initiatives and programmes because by doing so, we give the schools a greater sense of ownership to the programmes that they have developed, and we encourage them to do so by providing them with the necessary support. Therefore, we would like to encourage a diversity of different programmes and activities. Also, students will learn from different ways. So we encourage them to have different forms of integration programmes, rather than to formalise them and make it a formal programme. We would prefer to encourage them to have their own ideas so that they will be more effective in inculcating this multi-racial culture within the school.

Mr Zaqy Mohamad (Hong Kah): I would like to ask the Minister whether the students from SAP schools could truly benefit from multi-culturalism at the programme level as opposed to a daily interaction basis.

Mr Gan Kim Yong: Mr Speaker, in fact, some of the programmes are long-term programmes and they interact quite regularly. Let me give you an example. Hwa Chong Institution, for example, works very closely with its neighbourhood schools in terms of different cultural programmes. One example is West Spring Secondary and Bukit Panjang Government High. For these schools, they actually practise music together. In Hwa Chong, there is a Chinese orchestra. They have 24 festive drums as well as wushu. And from March to June, they will practise together with students from both schools. This culminates in a joint performance at the Racial Harmony Day in July. So they actually meet each other quite regularly within these three to four months. They practise together, get to know each other, learn from each other, and then they jointly perform together at the Racial Harmony Day.