Current Progress of Three-year Infant Childminding Service Pilot

Ms Yeo Wan Ling asked the Minister for Social and Family Development what is the progress of the three-year pilot to provide infant childminding services that was announced earlier this year.

The Minister of State for Social and Family Development (Ms Sun Xueling) (for the Minister of Social and Family Development): Mr Speaker, Sir, the Early Childhood Development Agency is in the midst of finalising details for the Childminding Pilot for Infants. The pilot will be launched in December 2024 for a period of three years.

More details will be provided in the coming weeks on the operators appointed onto the pilot, as well as how interested parents can apply for the pilot.

Mr Speaker: Ms Yeo Wan Ling.

Ms Yeo Wan Ling (Pasir Ris-Punggol): I thank the Minister of State for the reply. Given that childminding services can be a popular work choice with return-to-work women due to the flexibility of the work, what plans does the Ministry have to reach out to more women groups and the Labour Movement on promoting this as a viable work option? And what would be some of the successful endpoints for this pilot? Is there a golden ratio of childminders to population size, for instance?

Ms Sun Xueling: I thank the Member for her supplementary question. To answer her last question first, like I mentioned, the intent we are looking at through this pilot is we are looking to provide an affordable, safe service for infants, a service that is trusted by families with infants. So, the pilot is to test whether there is a market for this service. A successful endpoint would be a good take-up by parents with infants of this service and also a sustainable pipeline of supply of childminders from the operators.

So, as I shared, we are in the midst of discussing with the operators to appoint the appropriate operator. The operators are in charge of recruiting the childminders and when they are looking for these childminders, we will definitely put them in contact with groups, whether it is women groups or the Labour Movement, to extend their outreach to recruit these childminders.

We have shared earlier that the childminding ratio we are looking at is one childminder to two or three infants. So, in order to cater to 700 infants, which is our first key performance indicator to achieve in this pilot, we would need approximately 250 to 300 childminders.