In 2018, the Ministry of Education (MOE) launched UPLIFT, an inter-agency collaboration to strengthen support for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. MOE reached out to educators, social workers, and community partners to better understand factors that were holding back these children. One key finding emerged from these conversations – for these students to benefit from community efforts and resources, better coordination was critical.
What does coordination have to do with levelling the playing field? Well, take for example, financial assistance. Schools, various ministries, and community organisations each offer different forms of assistance to students and families, but those in need may not know all their options. They may not realise that they qualify for certain schemes, or they could be daunted by the paperwork involved. “It’s one thing to have schemes and programmes, but it’s another to make sure these actually reach families in need,” explains Mr Lim Yu Kee, the outgoing Director of MOE’s Uplift and Educational Support Branch (UESB).
Bridging that gap to help disadvantaged students flourish is exactly what his team does. “Education has always been an important social leveller,” says Mr Lim. “How do we ensure this continues to be the case, and disadvantaged students can keep up and progress even as the world becomes more complex?”
Mr Lim’s passion for helping disadvantaged students stems largely from his own experience. He grew up in a rental flat for the first 10 years of his life, and remembers most of his lunches being rice, a fried egg and soya sauce. Despite money being tight, Mr Lim had a happy childhood. “Looking back, it’s quite amazing that I got to where I am now,” he acknowledges. “I didn’t speak a single word of English until I entered school. But thanks to education, I managed to get quite a lot of opportunities.”
When he became a teacher, and later a Principal, Mr Lim naturally gravitated towards student development. “I was very strongly motivated to put in place robust processes in school for student well-being. I remember spending much of my time working with Year Heads to identify students who needed help and counselling them,” he says. “It is the holistic student development that really makes a difference in how the child progresses in the future.”
Building strong partnerships with the community
As Director of UESB, Mr Lim had his work cut out for him because the branch was launched in January 2020 – just a few months before Singapore went into a lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Students were no longer able to go to school so the reality of how their socio-economic backgrounds affected their access to learning devices, and even food, was thrown into stark relief.
His team worked late into the night every day, coordinating with schools to support students who were in particularly vulnerable situations. These extreme circumstances had a silver lining; MOE forged strong partnerships with community organisations and other ministries, particularly the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF). “Building these ties helped to lay a lot of groundwork for our subsequent work together,” he shares. “I think that’s one of the more exciting things that have happened over these five years – how two different ministries came together to help students and their families.”
With its expertise in social services for families, MSF is a natural partner for UPLIFT efforts. After all, there are limitations to how much schools can address students’ family issues, and tackling such issues is critical to helping disadvantaged students. “If the family situation is volatile, it’s very difficult to stabilise the life of the child,” says Mr Lim.
That’s why the family unit was an important focus for the UPLIFT Community Network (UCN) which piloted in 2020, aimed at supporting disadvantaged students showing early signs of absenteeism. Volunteer family befrienders were recruited to offer these students’ families general guidance. If more professional help was needed, the befriender would connect the family to Town-Level Coordinators (TLCs), who were full-time staff members sited in each town’s Social Service Office.
MSF played an important role in training these TLCs to better understand the social services landscape too. Separately, MSF launched its ComLink initiative (subsequently enhanced to ComLink+) which supports families with children living in public rental housing to improve their stability, self-reliance, and social mobility. Experience from both UCN and ComLink made MSF and MOE realise that “if you want to help the families get to the next level, volunteers alone are not enough”, says Mr Lim. “You need full-time staff, so you can train them, and put in place systems to monitor the progress of families directly.”
In 2023, UCN was integrated with ComLink+. While volunteer befrienders still offer families a listening ear, dedicated family coaches (which the TLC role is integrated into) now forge a direct connection with them. The integration also means that at-risk students identified by schools can now benefit from MSF’s expertise in providing support for their families. Similarly, MOE comes in to prop up the education aspect for the school-going children in families identified by ComLink+.
Engaging students with intentionality
Another example of UPLIFT efforts in gap-bridging involves the Student Care Centres that are now available in all primary schools. These were set up as a resource for working parents who are not able to take care of their children after school hours. But once they are established, the structured and supervised nature of these after-school spaces can also be beneficial for children from low-income families – even if they have a non-working parent at home.
“One of the things schools did were to actively go out to speak to these parents,” Mr Lim shares. “We wanted to help them understand that they were not abdicating their responsibilities just because they put their children in Student Care Centres. We explained how doing so could help give them a bit more bandwidth and breathing space to focus on all the other things they have to manage.”
Tailoring after-school experiences for students from disadvantaged backgrounds will continue to be a major focus. For instance, the UPLIFT team has been working with The Astronauts Collective, a non-profit organisation, to introduce students to mentors from Institutes of Higher Learning, as well as corporations. The team hopes that doing this can help motivate these students to develop long-term career aspirations.
The branch is also exploring ways to sharpen its focus and shift its interventions further upstream. Absenteeism has been one of the main criteria for identifying students who need more help since UPLIFT efforts started. Moving forward, it also wants to zoom in on students who are falling behind in their learning.
One key learning from the UPLIFT Enhanced School Resourcing – which allocates additional resources and consultancy to support schools with more vulnerable and at-risk students – is that success, once again, boils down to forging that direct connection between the help that is rendered and those who need it. “How can school leaders work with form teachers to identify kids who may need additional support and engagement, and make sure this information is fed back to a team planning the use of additional resources?” he elaborates.
“From there, how do we introduce interventions or programmes that are most targeted to meeting the students’ needs, and make sure we are deploying the most suitable people to engage these students, whether it’s a teacher, a vendor or a community partner? It’s about intentionality, planning, and working together.”
Building a movement
One of the things that Mr Lim is heartened by is how schools’ perception of community partnerships has shifted since the beginning of UPLIFT .
“When I first started, I experienced scepticism from schools about the need to work with the community, and if the community could really help with school issues,” he recalls. Having enjoyed fruitful collaborations with community partners in recent years, “schools are now a lot more active in bringing partners into the school space to jointly address problems. They are also going out into community space to discuss issues and tackle them together.”
This network-building mindset is important for the UESB officers too. Mr Lim describes UPLIFT as a movement – different people working on different things, all sharing the same goal of helping disadvantaged students move towards a better future. “The problems we face don’t have easy solutions, because the causal factors are interconnected, and the interventions can sometimes address multiple problems. We are not here to solve the problems ourselves, but rather, to bring everybody together, to solve problems together.”
