More parents may soon pay lower fees for childcare, with at least half a dozen operators keen to tap a government scheme that offers grants for centres to reduce their charges.
At least six large and mid-sized operators, which have over 5,000 childcare places in total, said they are likely to apply to the scheme announced earlier this month.
To be eligible for the Early Childhood Development Agency partner operator scheme, operators must lower fees, cap them at $800 a month for full-day childcare, and offer at least 300 childcare places each or as a group. The median fee is now $900 a month.
Smaller operators which do not meet the size requirement can partner others to apply, but those The Straits Times spoke to were unsure or not keen (see sidebar).
The application period ends on April 10. Operators will be appointed by the year end.
Major private childcare opera- tors Busy Bees (formerlyKnowledge Universe Singapore) and Modern Montessori International (MMI) said they are keen, but plan to include only their brands that cater to the mass market and have lower fees. They have more than 30 centres each and charge over $1,300 a month on average.
But MMI will have only its two centres under the Hamilton Preschool brand, which charge an average of $763 a month, take part. Busy Bees is likely to include only its three Small Wonder centres, which charge an average of $745 a month, in the scheme.
Busy Bees Asia chief executive June Rusdon said: “These centres also aim to offer good quality yet affordable services… Taking part in this scheme will expedite our cause to reach the masses.”
Some mid-sized operators are also keen and are likely to have all their centres take part.
Star Learners managing director Tan Meng Wei put it simply: “We welcome any help that they seek to provide.”
Just Kids Learning Place director Lurvin Lee said: “Funding will be helpful for rent, salaries, professional development course fees, and learning resources.”
But with the lack of details, some operators are undecided.
Carpe Diem and Sunflower Childcare want to know the grant amount, to determine if it is financially viable for them to take part.
A spokesman for the Early Childhood Development Agency would only say: “The scheme is a competitive process. The grant quantum will be based on the submissions and other information obtained from the shortlisted operators.”
With $250 million set aside for the scheme over five years, some hope that there will be many operators appointed.
Sweetlands Childcare director Chan Chew Shia said limiting the grants to some operators, such as the five current anchor operators, could lead to higher fees at centres that do not qualify.
With anchor operators getting grants and support to set up more centres, there has been more demand for teachers, resulting in higher salaries to attract them, she said. Centres run by non-anchor operators end up having to charge higher fees to cope with rising costs, she added.
Administration executive Lynnette Loong, 35, whose son attends childcare at Star Learners, is glad the pre-school is keen.
“Lower fees is good news. I hope the centres also get help in finding teachers, as a manpower shortage leads to rising staff costs and could lead to higher fees.”
Amos Yee, the 17-year-old teenager who made remarks about Lee Kuan Yew and who also challenged Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to sue him in an eight-minute YouTube video was arrested on Sunday, will be charged on Tuesday, March 31, 2015.
He faces three charges.
For the first charge, he will be charged for his deliberate intention to wound the religious or racial feelings of a person, which is an offence under Section 298 of the Penal Code. Upon conviction, the offence can be punished with jail of up to three years, or with a fine, or with both.
The second charge will be for circulating obscene material on his blog. The offence carries a punishment of a fine, or jail of up to three months, or both. The blog has been made private.
The third charge is for making threatening, abusive or insulting communication that is likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress. This is punishable by a fine of up to S$5,000.
The eight minute-long video, uploaded on March 27, shows Yee making insensitive comments about Christians. The video has since been made private.
The police said they received more than 20 reports on the video between last Friday and Sunday.
PKR said today that it would play the role of mediator between PAS and DAP to ensure that Pakatan Rakyat does not split up, following the latter’s decision to end ties with the Islamist party’s president Datuk Seri Abdul Hadi Awang over the hudud issue.
PKR secretary-general Rafizi Ramli said the party’s political bureau had held a meeting last night at which it was decided that PKR would meet separately with the warring PAS and DAP leaders to discuss the issues threatening to split the seven-year coalition.
“We want to sit down with PAS and DAP leadership. At the end of the day, even the most difficult issues have been resolved by sitting down and discussing,” he said at a press conference at the Parliament lobby today.
“Pakatan is like a tripod. We cannot survive without one leg. In spite of the miscommunication and internal problems, we have our common interests and we will move along the same direction.”
DAP said yesterday that although it would remain in PR, it was ending all ties with Hadi following the latter’s decision to go against the coalition in tabling a Private Member’s Bill on his own without discussing it with the rest of the leadership.
“DAP is unable to work with a PAS president like Hadi Awang who persists in such dishonest and dishonourable acts,” secretary-general Lim Guan Eng said.
“As Hadi is the PAS leader in PR, DAP’s decision to end all ties with Hadi will effectively put the PR leadership council in limbo. DAP will meet the PKR leadership to discuss the future course of PR.”
Lim later told reporters that Hadi should leave the opposition coalition if he insisted on implementing hudud in Kelantan.
Hadi had come under severe criticism after failing to agree to the decision made at the PR leadership council meeting on February 8, where it was agreed that Kelantan PAS’s hudud bill to amend the state’s Shariah Criminal Code Enactment II (1993) would first be discussed by all three PR party leaders, before it was tabled in the legislative assembly.
The frictions between both parties came to a head after Hadi had gone ahead to submit a private member’s bill on March 18 to Parliament without presenting it first to the PAS central committee and to the PR leadership council.
Rafizi said today that although the matter cannot be swept under the carpet, the hudud issue is not big enough to put the coalition at a breaking point.
“We had also discussed our differences about the hudud in 2011 and resolved it. In the end, the commom interest of the coalition is to bring up pressing issues concerning the rakyat.
“There will be some skirmishes, problems between two parties and the other one tries to bring back peace. There have been problems between PAS and PKR.
“When we were preparing the shadow budget and manifesto, there were a lot of shouting, walk-outs and yet we managed to come together and present our budget and common policy framework,” he added.
“By making that stand, we have declared that it is very hard for us to work with Hadi now,” he said.
PARIS — As officials struggled Wednesday to explain why a jet with 150 people on board crashed in relatively clear skies, an investigator said evidence from a cockpit voice recorder indicated one pilot left the cockpit before the plane’s descent and was unable to get back in.
A senior military official involved in the investigation described “very smooth, very cool” conversation between the pilots during the early part of the flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf. Then the audio indicated that one of the pilots left the cockpit and could not re-enter.
“The guy outside is knocking lightly on the door and there is no answer,” the investigator said. “And then he hits the door stronger and no answer. There is never an answer.”
He said, “You can hear he is trying to smash the door down.”
While the audio seemed to give some insight into the circumstances leading up to the Germanwings crash on Tuesday morning, it also left many questions unanswered.
“We don’t know yet the reason why one of the guys went out,” said the official, who requested anonymity because the investigation is continuing. “But what is sure is that at the very end of the flight, the other pilot is alone and does not open the door.”
The data from the voice recorder seems only to deepen the mystery surrounding the crash and provides no indication of the condition or activity of the pilot who remained in the cockpit. The descent from 38,000 feet over about 10 minutes was alarming but still gradual enough to indicate that the twin-engine Airbus A320 had not been damaged catastrophically. At no point during the descent was there any communication from the cockpit to air traffic controllers or any other signal of an emergency.
When the plane plowed into craggy mountains northeast of Nice, it was traveling with enough speed that it was all but pulverized, killing the 144 passengers and crew of six and leaving few clues.
The French aviation authorities have made public very little, officially, about the nature of the information that has been recovered from the audio recording, and it was not clear whether it was partial or complete. France’s Bureau of Investigations and Analyses confirmed only that human voices and other cockpit sounds had been detected and would be subjected to detailed analysis.
Asked about the new evidence revealed in the cockpit recordings, Martine del Bono, a bureau spokeswoman, declined to comment. “Our teams continue to work on analyzing the CVR,” she said, referring to the cockpit voice recorder. “As soon as we have accurate information we intend to hold a press conference.”
Meanwhile, prosecutors in Marseille, who have been tasked with a separate criminal inquiry into the crash, could not immediately be reached for comment. Brice Robin, the Marseille prosecutor, was due to meet Thursday morning with the families of the crash victims.
At the crash site, a senior official working on the investigation said, workers found the casing of the plane’s other black box, the flight data recorder, but the memory card containing data on the plane’s altitude, speed, location and condition was not inside, apparently having been thrown loose or destroyed by the impact.
Rémi Jouty, the director of the French Bureau of Investigations and Analyses, said at a news conference that the plane took off at around 10 a.m. local time from Barcelona and that the last message sent from the pilot to air traffic controllers had been at 10:30 a.m., which indicated that the plane was proceeding on course.
But minutes later, the plane inexplicably began to descend, Mr. Jouty said. At 10:40 and 47 seconds, the plane reported its last radar position, at an altitude of 6,175 feet. “The radar could follow the plane until the point of impact,” he said.
Mr. Jouty said the plane slammed into a mountainside and disintegrated, scattering debris over a wide area, and making it difficult to analyze what had happened.
It often takes months or even years to determine the causes of plane crashes, but a little more than a year after the disappearance of a Malaysian airlines jetliner that has never been found, the loss of the Germanwings flight is shaping up to be particularly perplexing to investigators.
One of the main questions outstanding is why the pilots did not communicate with air traffic controllers as the plane began its unusual descent, suggesting that either the pilots or the plane’s automated systems may have been trying to maintain control of the aircraft as it lost altitude.
Among the theories that have been put forward by air safety analysts not involved in the investigation is the possibility that a pilot could have been incapacitated by a sudden event such as a fire or a drop in cabin pressure.
A senior French official involved in the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the lack of communication from the pilots during the plane’s descent was disturbing, and that the possibility that their silence was deliberate could not be ruled out.
“I don’t like it,” said the French official, who cautioned that his initial analysis was based on the very limited information currently available. “To me, it seems very weird: this very long descent at normal speed without any communications, though the weather was absolutely clear.”
“So far, we don’t have any evidence that points clearly to a technical explanation,” the official said. “So we have to consider the possibility of deliberate human responsibility.”
Mr. Jouty said it was far too early in the investigation to speculate about possible causes.
“At this moment I have no beginning of a scenario,” Mr. Jouty said. However, he said there was not yet any evidence available that would support either a theory of a depressurization or of a midair explosion.
Speaking on the French radio station RTL, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Wednesday morning that terrorism was not a likely “hypothesis at the moment,” but that no theories had been definitively excluded. He said the size of the area over which debris was scattered suggested that the aircraft had not exploded in the air but rather had disintegrated on impact.
Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings, has characterized the crash as an accident. The airline has not disclosed the identities of the pilots, except to say that the captain was a 10-year veteran with more than 6,000 hours of flying time in A320s.
The French Bureau of Investigations and Analyses, which is leading the technical inquiry into the crash, sent seven investigators to the crash site on Tuesday. They have been joined by their counterparts from Germany, as well as by technical advisers from Airbus and CFM International, the manufacturer of the plane’s engines.
Speaking on Europe 1 radio, Jean-Paul Troadec, a former director of the French air accident investigation bureau, said one of the big challenges for investigators would be to protect the debris at the crash site from any inadvertent damage.
“We need to ensure that all the evidence is well preserved,” Mr. Troadec said, referring both to the pieces of the plane littered across the steep slopes as well as to the remains of the victims. The identification of the victims will most likely require matching DNA from the remains with samples from relatives.
Cabin depressurization, one of the possibilities speculated about on Wednesday, has occurred before, perhaps most notably in the crash of a Cypriot passenger plane in 2005 that killed all 121 people on board as it approached Athens. In that case, Helios Airways Flight 522, a slow loss of pressure rendered both pilots and all the passengers on the Boeing 737 jet unconscious for more than three-quarters of an hour before the aircraft ran out of fuel and slammed into a wooded gorge near the Greek capital.
Investigators eventually determined that the primary cause of that crash was a series of human errors, including deficient maintenance checks on the ground and a failure by the pilots to heed emergency warning signals.
I am filing this report as my concern to what is happening every Sunday at our parks and public places. I hope the authorities and the public will look into this issues.
Every Sunday, Paya Lebar and Lucky Plaza have become a ‘flesh market’ for thousands of Banglas to gather, stalk, prey and pick maids for their lust and sexual desires.
Also check-out every Sunday at the East Coast Park, Carpark D, Banglas and maids pitch tents for their ‘sex love nests’ for their immoral activities. Right in a public recreational park and beach areas that are meant for family outings. I am sure making love in a public area is a punishable offence.
The open space between Kallang Airport Drive and Kallang Airport Way is littered with couples, Banglas and maids. Openly displaying ‘intimate and sensuous’ behaviours.
This are not a normal boy/girl relationships of love and marriage, these are clear cut issues of sex predators taking advantage of naïve, vulnerable maids for their sexual pleasures. As we know the Banglas/Indians come from a country where women are subservient to men, a male chauvinistic society, a rape occurs every 15 minutes.
Our maids have become the weekend ‘comfort women’ for these Bangla sex predators. Both Banglas and maids have it free and easy for sexual misconduct in Singapore.
As we know hundreds of maids are pregnant every year, as always the girls get used and abandon.
Sexual offences goes unreported.The maids do not how to complain and address their problems, They are easily exploited. On numerous occasions I have heard of maids after booking a hotel room with their Bangla boyfriends, find their money and possession missing along with their boyfriends. I also heard cases of sexual offences, forced sex, spiked drinks and broken promises
When molest and rapes do happen, most maids are too scared to report , whatever happens these girls will never ever report to the authorities or police let alone inform their employers. They are the silent victims.
There are more sinister intentions besides a normal Bangla and maid relationship. Willing or unwilling the line must not be crossed, all this must be within the boundaries of Singapore laws. I believe these foreign workers have contravene and defy their working contract which requires good behavior and not to cause public unease. These foreign workers have displayed bahaviours that have been very disconcerting and caused unease and disgust among Singaporeans.
Action must be taken to apprehend these sex predators, curtailed such abuses and protect our maids.
After taking care of liquors and drinkers, its time to reprimand and discipline Banglas/Indians sexpredators of stalking, preying and sexploiting our maids.
My suggestions,
• Every Sundays, the authorities, Police and MOM must check-out and record Banglas/Indians and maids booking into cheap hourly rates hotels, eg Hotel 81,involving in “illicit, inappropriate and unacceptable sexual relationship”.
• The National Parks authority must keep track of park users and camp sites not for sinister activities.
• Bangla/Indian drivers must not use their employers vans, on Sundays for making love. ( recently I saw a van with mattress, maids in East Coast Park)
• Banglas and maids who display ‘flirtatious and indecent behavior’ in public.
• In Sentosa, Banglas/Indians taking photos or oggling at bikini swimmers must be apprehended.
This is a problem that needs to be addressed by the authorities. If nothing is done, then this will continue to happen indefinitely, Banglas will become more bolder and more innocent maids will fall victims indefinitely.
