05 July 2020
The Ministry of Education has stated that every secondary school student will receive a personal laptop or tablet by next year.
Thus, no student will be left behind in the push toward digitization as well as home-based learning, and social mobility will be kept alive. Each student will have equal opportunity to do well, regardless of his or her starting point.
Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who is also the Coordinating Minister for Social Policies, said that social mobility is an integral part of Singapore’s identity.
Indeed, every successful country has found that it gets more difficult to sustain social mobility with time. The gap widens when parents with higher education or who have become better off invest more in their children, moving them further ahead of the rest.
In this respect, Mr Tharman said the Government and its partners have been working to equalise opportunities for Singaporeans.
The Ministry of Education has also been allocating extra resources to schools for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. They will be given more support in the coming years, with the hiring of more teachers, allied educators, student welfare officers and teacher-counsellors.
These efforts complement the ministry’s Uplift (Uplifting Pupils in Life and Inspiring Families Taskforce) programme, in which schools and the community collaborate to support students from disadvantaged families. The additional resources thus pooled together will help students to go as far as they can through the full subject-based banding system in secondary schools, which allows students to take subjects at varying levels of difficulty based on their strengths.