Permanent Secretary, Mr Chiang Chie Foo

2^nd Permanent Secretary, Lieutenant-General Lim Chuan Poh

Director-General of Education, Mr Wee Heng Tin

Mr Alex Cha, Chairman, Singapore Sports Council

Chairman of the Organising Committee, Mr Wong Siew Hoong

Distinguished speakers and guests

Principals and teachers

Ladies and Gentlemen

It gives me great pleasure to join you this morning at this Co-Curricular Activities Conference, jointly organised by the Singapore Schools Sports Council and the Co-Curricular Activities Branch of MOE. I would like to commend them both for taking the lead in organising this conference. The presence of more than 1,000 educators at the conference underscores the importance of CCA in what we set out to deliver in education, and the commitment of our school leaders to providing a holistic education for our young.

CCAs play an integral role in the education we seek to provide our young. They help our students grow, into citizens with hearts rooted in Singapore and eyes focused on the world. They develop life skills that matter long after a student has left school and forgotten his theorems, hypotheses and history. Every teacher knows of students who took their CCA more seriously than most, excelled in it, and went on eventually to make a mark in the professions or in enterprise. Some of them are in fact here today, and a few have been invited to speak later.

If CCA has been important in the past, it will be more important in the future. This is because some of the key traits that our young need to succeed in the future, a more complex and frequently changing future, will be cultivated most effectively by engaging them in CCA, in teams as well as in individual pursuits.

We are setting sail into new waters, as a people and a country. Our young will navigate a sea of new challenges and new opportunities. It is fundamentally a more uncertain world, wherever they go. A world not just of change but of unpredictable change. Global competition is intense, and filtering into every segment of economic activity. Leadership in any industry is also more fluid, with late starters catching up with and overtaking established leaders. The old totem pole, with the developed countries on top followed by the newly industrialising economies of NIEs and next the emerging economies like those in Southeast Asia and then ex-socialist countries like China, is gone. No lead is given for very long. And whole industries such as telecommunications, chemicals, finance and transport being reshaped under the impact of new international competition, and new technological opportunities. The restructuring is continuous, over and over again, not once-off.

We have also entered a more uncertain security environment. Terrorism is endemic in the region, and globally. But the future is not all bleak. It is also an environment rich with opportunities. We are indeed at the cusp of a new wave of wealth creation in Asia, with China, India and the ASEAN nations opening up and growing faster than any other region in the world. The signs of dynamism are unmistakable. New supply chains, linking up factories across Asia, new middle classes emerging and demanding new products and services, new opportunities for those willing to take a calculated risk, or to rough it out.

We have to respond to this new landscape, and prepare our young so that they have greatest advantage in it. We have to give them a strong foundation of knowledge in school, and an appetite to learn continuously. That’s fundamental, no matter what we do in education.

But a future of frequent and often unsettling change will call on more than academic abilities. It will require a certain tenacity among our young. They will need a robust attitude to life and the surprises that it brings. They must have more of a spirit of ‘can-do’, the willingness to try your hand at something new and even untried, when something else fails. This tenacity will hold our young well, and hold Singapore well.

We must also redouble our efforts to preserve and strengthen racial harmony, in an environment that will often challenge what we have achieved. We have made great progress over the last four decades. We have an integrated, national school system today, vastly different in structure and in everyday experiences from the system of segregated, vernacular schools that we had not very long ago. Our schools have reinforced this with a range of programmes and informal practices, through the year, aimed at increasing understanding and mixing between the races.

But nation building is work in progress. We can do more. Schools remain a key experience in everyone’s lives, and play a central responsibility in building a cohesive society. We have to be alert to small differences and preferences among children of different races, which may appear inconsequential, but which can be compounded as the children grow older, leading to an unwitting segregation of the races. We have to continue to find interesting and natural ways of strengthening interaction and friendships between students of different backgrounds.

There are therefore two key challenges we have to address - first, of nurturing in our youth a flexible and robust outlook to life, so that they can thrive in an environment of disruptive change; and second, the challenge of bonding our young closer together as Singaporeans. Both challenges demand a holistic approach to education, with a strong emphasis on building character and camaraderie. CCAs provide the best opportunities to develop these traits and habits.

The last major CCA conference was held 12 years ago, in 1991. It was then called ECA. Since then, we have placed greater importance on CCA. Even the name change, from ECA (Extra-curricular Activities) to CCA (Co-curricular Activities) was significant. It was not a cosmetic change, but a clear statement to everyone involved in education that CCA is an integral part of education, not an add-on or option. Substantive changes have followed. Most importantly, the use of CCA bonus points for admission to Pre-university courses from 1998, and starting from this year, CCA bonus points for university admission. These changes have sent signals right through the system: CCA matters. (We have also comprehensively reviewed the system of CCA scoring, implementing PEARLS in the JCs and CIs in 2001, and LEAPS, the revised secondary school guidelines, at Sec 1 from this year.)

We have also seen an increase in the variety of CCA activities over the last decade or so. A good example is sailing, where our school athletes now represent Singapore at international regattas. Cricket, an old favourite, has found its way back into the calendar and looks set to remain. Bowling and rhythmic gymnastics are some of the newer CCAs. Further, student participation has increased - witness the 30% growth in the number of participants, in the Singapore Youth Festival over the last 3 years alone. Other milestones include the introduction of the Character Development Programme in 2001.

I am also heartened to see a trend of CCAs being offered to a growing number of children in primary schools. While CCA is not compulsory for every pupil at the primary level, many schools have consciously promoted this. Such efforts should continue, especially at the upper primary levels. Woodlands Primary School, for instance, organised for the second year running, a 3-day festival of sports for its primary 3 to primary 6 pupils. According to Woodlands’ principal, Colin Pereira, about 4 percent of the pupils in the school participate in competitive sports, but the festival was to involve the other 96 percent. The sports festival offers a chance for the majority to experience the joy of playing.

We have to place more emphasis on CCA going forward. The challenge is to do this without increasing the overall curriculum load of students, and the workload of teachers. We should enhance the CCA experience, without creating overload in the system. It will be fruitful for you to apply your minds collectively to this challenge, and draw lessons from each other on how we can do this.

I will mention two areas which can be pursued as we enhance the role of CCA. We can see how to broaden the scope of CCA offerings, and expand choice. And we can see how we can use CCA more effectively to achieve bonding between students of different backgrounds.

How can we broaden the scope of CCA? The framework of CCA activities remains sound, and is reflected in the design of PEARLS in JCs and CIs, and LEAPS in secondary schools. But we could be more flexible in our recognition of CCA activities. First, we should explore how we can encourage and recognise student-initiated activities. Students who are keen on an activity that is not offered can gather interested peers and convince a teacher to endorse or sponsor the activity. The activity should then be considered by the school for CCA points, as long as it meets the objectives of CCA. This approach will help spawn a greater sense of initiative among students, and a willingness to do things differently. It will allow students to pursue an activity that interests them seriously, without having to do so outside the curriculum.

Second, to expand the scope of CCA, the Ministry will also extend recognition to students volunteering for community projects organised by Community Centres or Clubs. They may use their hours of involvement to earn CCA points. The school will however have to approve the student’s participation in the project or activity, and be kept fully informed by the CC of the student’s attendance in order that CCA points can be awarded. This is to ensure that the project meets the school’s objectives for its students and is of an acceptable nature and standard.

However we widen the scope of recognised CCA activity, we cannot lose sight of our key objectives. We have to consciously develop CCA strategies to maximise the development of both excellence and bonding among our young. CCA offers great opportunity for students of different backgrounds to play together, to spend the year training together, to win and lose together, and to rough it out in camps together. Ultimately, to build a sense of comfort and friendship with each other.

The leadership and support of principals for CCA is crucial in mapping out a comprehensive CCA programme in each school, aimed at achieving these objectives of excellence and bonding. We want to provide opportunity for those who can excel in a sport or activity to go as far as they can. We are doing this well. But we also want to reach out to and encourage the others, who may just want to enjoy a game or pick up the basic skills. We have to use CCA to build a broad base of participation, especially in activities that build team spirit and gamesmanship. Every child should have the chance to go through a modern equivalent of Jack Neo’s Homerun.

One good example is the integrated and whole-school approach taken by Admiralty Primary School. The school has mapped out a comprehensive arts education programme for teaching National Education. Through activities like music and dance, the school seeks to systematically expose all pupils to the various traditions and cultures of the races in Singapore.

There are many other examples of schools which are using CCA to build bonds among students from different ethnic backgrounds, either within the school or through partnerships with other schools. The Committee on Strengthening Racial Harmony in Schools, chaired by Parliamentary Secretary Mr Hawazi Daipi, has been guiding and encouraging them on, and helping schools to share effective practices.

We should keep up the momentum. We have to explore how we can do more, in creative and interesting ways, to achieve this bonding. Not every sport or dance attracts pupils from all races. We should explore how we can interest pupils in activities that they do not naturally gravitate towards. There are already many examples. Eunos Primary, which I visited recently, won a Gold award in Indian dance at this year’s SYF. But only 2 of their dancers were in fact Indian. The Principal, Mrs Ang Chin Du, and her teachers related this to me with pride. It was part and parcel of what they were doing to encourage racial integration. I was also struck by another recent example. At the National Inter-School Wushu Tournament, 2 Malay girls represented Hong Kah Primary School. They did very well. 12 year-old Nor Atikah won a gold medal while Salisha won a silver.

Our schools and teachers themselves are best placed to work out interesting and innovative ways of encouraging integration between children of different social and ethnic backgrounds. MOE will not prescribe, as each school is unique in its character, and the most effective programmes will always be those that are sparked off by principals and teachers. I know schools are thinking hard about this. Some have also got their students engaged in devising ways of encouraging interaction among themselves.

How well we succeed in our CCA programmes will ultimately depend on what our teachers infuse into them. It is the teachers who encourage our young to discover talents they never knew of, and help their students to build character and leadership through the activities they organise. It is a large responsibility, which our teachers undertake tirelessly. They deserve full credit.

We will continue to train teachers so that they are confident in carrying out this task, and developing better ways of delivering the CCA programmes. I am glad to note that NIE has an enrichment programme on the management of CCAs for trainee teachers in the PGDE (Postgraduate Diploma in Education). This is a good start. Given the criticality of CCA in education going forward, we will review if more has to be done to prepare our teachers to contribute to successful CCA programmes.

Conferences such as today’s, are good ways of keeping ourselves prepared for a changing environment. By looking forward, they also nudge us to take a step back to see how we can re-tune our systems, processes and approaches. The symposium of speakers and the sharing of practices by the schools at this conference will I am sure offer fresh perspectives.

CCA will be an increasingly important part of the holistic education we seek to provide our young. We have to encourage our students to take it seriously, so that they develop the qualities that will see them through a future that will be more challenging than the past. If we do this well, our young will stride confidently and with sturdy hearts, not falter when faced with the unexpected. They will ride the changes that come, look for opportunities in every downturn, and venture out to seize every advantage.

I commend you all for your commitment to preparing our young for this future, and wish you a day of meaningful discussions and deliberations.

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