Number of Families Affected when Childcare Centres are No Longer Mandated to Operate on Saturdays

Mr Speaker, Sir, in reviewing the provision of Saturday childcare services, the Early Childhood Development Agency (ECDA) surveyed over 8,000 parents with children in childcare employed across different industries. More than 99% of the surveyed parents did not require Saturday childcare services or could make alternative care arrangements. Less than 1% of those surveyed had both parents who worked on Saturdays and did not have alternative care arrangements.

When announcing these changes in July 2023, we recognised that sufficient lead time was necessary to minimise the impact to families which may be affected ahead of the implementation of the changes in January 2025. Kindly allow me to share how we started this journey.

In October 2022, Minister Masagos, the Minister for Social and Family Development, had announced that ECDA would engage parents, operators and educators to co-develop ways to improve working conditions, with outcomes to be shared by mid-2023. A key idea then, which resonated strongly, was the review of the requirement of provision of Saturday childcare services.

From November 2022 to January 2023, ECDA carried out public consultations with the stakeholders and analysis on the initiatives to improve working conditions. Minister Masagos then announced in July 2023 that ECDA will remove the mandatory requirement for early childhood development centres to operate on Saturdays, with effect from 1 January 2025.

The main objective of this shift to a five-day work week was to improve the well-being of early childhood educators and make early childhood careers more attractive and sustainable. As Members can see, we had started this process early. Families were informed early, so that they could make alternative caregiving arrangements or work out appropriate arrangements with their employers.

For example, employees can request for flexible workplace arrangements with employers, and the employers have to properly consider and assess, as set out in the Tripartite Guidelines on Flexible Workplace Arrangement Requests.

I thank the Minister of State for the reply. Several small and medium enterprises (SMEs) owners who operate on weekends, such as retail, food and beverage (F&B) and essential services business owners, have expressed concern on the lack of childcare support options on Saturdays. Despite the much earlier announcement in 2023, they tell me that they are unaware of the changes and have not factored this into their scheduling plans.

Would the Ministry be doing another round of engagements with employers before the changes take place in January 2025? And would the Ministry also provide updates on alternatives on other affordable weekend childcare options?

I thank the Member for her supplementary questions. I know that the Member has been a strong advocate for the retail, as well as the F&B industry. So, I take in her feedback and ECDA takes in this feedback seriously.

As we have shared, we started this journey very early. ECDA had been sending out letters to the preschool operators to inform them that there is no need to provide Saturday childcare services if there is no requirement to do so. We have also sent out letter templates to these preschool operators for them to send out to the parents of the children to inform them that we will be stopping the provision of the Saturday preschool services starting 1 January 2025.

Following from this initiative, we will also be further sharing with the families that they can consider tapping on paid, as well as community-based options, such as the home-based childminding programme by Daughters of Tomorrow as well as other services, such as playgroup and enrichment classes, which are conducted at the community clubs and centres on Saturday mornings.

Sir, I thank the Minister of State for her reply. My focus is more on the early childhood educators. Sir, the impetus of removing the mandate on preschools having to operate on Saturdays was meant to improve the working conditions of our early childhood educators by allowing them to have a five-day work week. I fully support this. But I note that with the removal of Saturday services, work that the preschool teachers used to do on Saturdays would now need to be done on the weekdays.

I understand that this would include lesson preparation, administrative work, classroom set-up and even attending training. Sir, the handling of a class of toddlers for a full day is already very challenging. So, beyond the physical working hours, I am quite concerned about the hours that our early childhood educators spend outside of these official working hours, in particular, attending to parents' queries. This is a common issue that teachers face.

I note that the Minister for Education had recently stated that the Ministry of Education teachers are not required to respond to work-related messages after school hours. I would, therefore, like to ask if ECDA could provide early childhood educators with a similar right to disconnect, so that they can have protected rest time outside of their work hours.

I thank the Member for his supplementary question, as well as feedback and suggestions. As I had mentioned in my main reply, shifting to a five-day work week, fundamentally, is to improve the well-being of our early childhood educators and to make early childhood careers more attractive as well as sustainable. So, this change should not come at the expense of our educators' wages.

I also know that the working hours and the wages are really decided between the educator as well as their employer, which is the childcare operator. There are broader moves in the entire early childhood industry to lower the stress levels as well as increase the productivity of our early childhood educators.

So, the use of, for example, technology solutions to take away some of the more manual tasks, for instance, when it comes to attendance taking, or in the areas of handling feedback from parents. This is a continuous work-in-progress and I think we are totally on the same page, aligned in our common interests to make sure that we improve the working conditions of our early childhood educators.

I take the Member's point on the right to disconnect and I think this is something that the Member has been championing across various sectors and industries for our workers. So, I will share that with ECDA and I thank the Member very much for his feedback.