Strengthening after-school support
- We have set up Student Care Centres in all 185 primary schools, to provide students a safe, supportive and structured environment after school.
- We will partner families to more proactively enrol children with greater needs in after-school care, so that they would benefit from the additional support.
- We will work towards improving affordability of school-based student care.
Scaling up after-school engagement in secondary schools
- 120 secondary schools to offer GEAR-UP, which includes mentoring and interest-based programmes.
Enhanced community support for disadvantaged students
- UPLIFT Town-Level Coordinators (TLC) at Woodlands, Kreta Ayer and Boon Lay to organise community support for disadvantaged students with emerging attendance issues.
- Strengthen partnerships between schools and the community, including corporates, to support disadvantaged students.
Enhanced financial support
- Better support for students on the MOE Financial Assistance Scheme (FAS) in the form of higher public transport subsidies (primary school to pre-university students), higher school bus subsidies (primary school students), and higher meal subsidies (secondary school students).
- Yearly bursary for pre-university students to increase from $900 to $1,000.
- Full-time Higher Nitec and Nitec students from low- and middle-income households will receive $50 to $200 more in annual cash bursary. Those in the lowest income tier will also receive 100% fee subsidy, on top of annual cash bursary.
- 100% fee subsidy for all ITE Community Scholarship recipients, on top of annual cash award of $1,600.
- Enhancements to bursaries for full-time and part-time diploma and undergraduate students, which were announced in 2019, will take effect from AY2020.
Strengthening support for Special Educational Needs (SEN)
- Existing SEN fund for Polytechnic/ITE students will be extended to students with learning and language difficulties, such as Dyslexia, and social and behavioural difficulties, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder.
- Such students can use up to $5,000 from the SEN Fund to purchase Assistive Technology (AT) devices from 1 April 2020.
- SEN Professional Development (PD) roadmap to train educators in mainstream schools to support students with SEN.
- NIE to enhance pre-service training for teachers.
- All educators can access bite-sized online learning modules.
- In-service training places for Allied Educators (Learning and Behavioural Support) have been increased tenfold to 600 places from July 2019 onwards.
