SINGAPORE: The Education Minister announced that Junior Colleges
will not move to a single March intake next year as originally
planned.
But this is only temporary, until 2008 when the Ministry hopes to
move to a single intake in January.
Junior Colleges will now have to plan for students to be in college
from January to March but many were doing so anyway because of the
Integrated Programme, and students are looking forward to the
January orientation programmes.
"With the injection of JC students, it'll be a bigger cohort and
the IP students get to interact with the JC students." said Ho Zi
Wei, a 2nd year student from the Integrated Programme at National
Junior College.
Most of the Junior Colleges spoken to said the postponement of the
Single Intake posed no administrative difficulties, because they
could easily revert to what they had been doing for years.
"We have a lot of enrichment programmes, we can always use these
enrichment programmes for another occasion and perhaps during the
vacation. We've come up with a model on how we can have enrichment
programmes around the year. For IP students they're not much
affected because we have enrichments anyway. For the JC students,
we pace it in because of the new change, in anticipation for better
things to come!" said Virginia Cheng, the Principal of National
Junior College.
Principals and parents say a Single Intake in January is worth
waiting for since it synchronises the school year.
"We thought it's a good thing to delay, because with the delay we
can focus on getting a better system in a few years' time. And then
we can now focus on implementing the new curriculum. It's better to
wait rather than have constant changes. If you keep on changing the
timing I think it's very disruptive." added Ms Cheng.
This was echoed by secondary schools - even those like CHIJ St
Nicholas and Anglo-Chinese in Barker Road - which were originally
going to bring forward their prelims.
Now they will re-strategise their time-tables to make sure students
also ace their prelims.
"The school curriculum, of course in terms of revision with the
kids, we will have to move things a little bit earlier, for the
prelims as well as thereafter for the 'O' levels. But no scramble
otherwise! " said Ng Eng Chin, Principal of Anglo-Chinese (Barker
Road).
Asked on Thursday at an event, the Education Minister said he
believes the Ministry can re-engineer the whole system and put in
the single January intake in future. - CNA