1. Good afternoon everyone. I will be talking about schools and workplaces.
2. First, on schools. Mental health can affect the well-being and overall development of our students. For MOE, this is one of the priorities for us.
- Over the years, we have been equipping our students with basic skills and knowledge for them to have mental well-being, as well as to have resilience.
- On top of that, we have also been strengthening the ecosystem to support the well-being of our students. Our educators, for example, have been trained with basic skills and knowledge to identify students in distress and refer them for counselling help. Our teachers also have some basic counselling skills to reach out to students.
- There are also school counsellors that our students can reach out to. Our school counsellors are trained professionals and can help with socio-emotional issues that our students face from time to time. These counsellors also have access to a wider network of support, including REACH which is managed by MOE and MOH, for students who need help that is beyond the school counsellors.
- Amongst the students, we have also been encouraging and building peer supporters in every school, as well as in our Institutes of Higher Learning. Afterall, students and youths may be more comfortable talking to their friends than to adults. We would like students to be able to identify fellow friends who might need their help, and also to reach out for help to adults, teachers, or counsellors when necessary.
3. We are very glad that this Tiered Care Model that SMS Janil spoke about will help to increase the capacity of mental well-being support and mental healthcare for our students. This can improve the timeliness of support and the intervention when needed.
4. Besides the Tiered Care Model, we are going to strengthen the partnership with parents, who are the ones shaping the everyday experiences of our students at home and outside of school.
- Today, MOE already equips our parents with some basic tools and knowledge, mainly through the Parents Gateway modules that parents can refer to easily.
- We also have Parent Support Groups. Some Parent Support Groups are very active and interested in learning more about mental well-being and mental health support for their own children and sharing this knowledge with their fellow parents. We think we can do more in this space.
5. This Parents' Toolbox will be a new thing that we are going to launch next year. The Parents' Toolbox seeks to provide parents with personalised knowledge and skills for them to foster stronger parent-child relationships. There will be various modules within this Parents' Toolbox on how to have stronger resilience in children; how to be more independent; how to solve problems; guide their children to deal with difficult emotional issues, and very importantly for parents to guide their children to know when, where and how to seek help.
6. This Parents' Toolbox will be rolled out progressively from next year onwards. We will be looking out for feedback from parents on how effective this is and what else we can do to make this Toolbox work for parents.
7. In a nutshell, MOE will continue to strengthen our ecosystem of support for our students, and we look towards to the Tiered Care Model, as well as the Parents' Toolbox and partnership with parents to improve the support of mental well-being for our students. We believe that if we can take good care of our students' mental well-being, our children will be well-placed to achieve their fullest potential in school, in work, and in life.