21 August 2016
Singapore’s Special Assistance Plan (SAP) schools came under scrutiny recently when participants of a conference on diversity suggested that SAP schools offer Malay or Tamil language classes.
But Minister of State for Education Janil Puthucheary was not in favour of it, saying: “We do not want to make use of racial tokenism in order to provoke a cultural position.”
Dr Janil said SAP schools play an important cultural role in Singapore. They were started in 1979 in an effort to entrench the Chinese language and heritage among the Chinese members of the population.
Similar programmes exist for Malay and Tamil, but do not have comparable take-up rates.