Retired teachers can be ‘good source of supply’ to increase pool of mother tongue pre-school teachers: MOE

SINGAPORE: Retired teachers can potentially be a “good source of supply” to augment the pool of local mother tongue language teachers in the pre-school sector, said Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Education Low Yen Ling in Parliament on Monday (Nov 6).

However, they will need to be updated with the relevant training and skill sets, she added.

Ms Low, who was responding to a question from MP Intan Azura Mokhtar, also revealed that currently, six in 10 mother tongue language teachers in the pre-school sector are locals. “We will double up the efforts in continuing to attract mother tongue language teachers to our sector,” she said.

Dr Intan had noted that there are still “quite a number” of foreign mother tongue language teachers in pre-school centres.

“The concern really is about their bilingual abilities, understanding of local cultures and contexts and conversational accents in teaching our children,” she said, asking if there are plans for conversion programmes for retired mother tongue language teachers from primary schools or current primary school teachers, should they wish to join the pre-school sector.

In response, Ms Low said the teachers will need to undertake “brief bridging programmes”. She explained that if the teacher was previously teaching mother tongue in a primary school, he or she would need to do such a programme in early childhood education.

“If the retired teacher was previously teaching non-mother tongue language subjects like mathematics or science, then we will require the teacher to undertake a brief bridging programme in early childhood education, and also mother tongue language contextualised for the pre-school sector,” she added.

Ms Low stressed that the Government is committed to exploring all possible avenues to augment the pool of local mother tongue language teachers in pre-schools.

She added that the Early Childhood Development Agency (ECDA) and the Education Ministry (MOE) have been working actively to grow the number of local pre-school teachers, including mother tongue language teachers. And the various efforts have grown the pool of local teachers dedicated to mother tongue language teaching by 35 per cent since 2015, to about 3,300 today.