Forum: Two ways to keep student care centres accountable

I am one of the parents affected by the contractual breaches of student care operator Little Professors (

Student care operator Little Professors under probe by authorities over unpaid salaries of 54 staff

, Feb 14).

The operator made unauthorised GIRO deductions on at least five occasions over the last 13 months, and there may have been more – we do not have easy access to statements beyond 12 months.

We have had numerous issues with this student care centre for years, but the avenues to raise concerns and the lines of accountability have not always been clear.

Student care services operate in a liminal space between the Ministry of Education (MOE) and the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF). MSF oversees student care centre (SCC) licensing through the Child Care Centres Act, but SCCs are embedded within schools.

Centres that wish to administer the Student Care Fee Assistance must be registered with MSF, meet minimum requirements, and are subject to audit checks. MSF has also published guidelines for SCCs setting out comprehensive requirements.

When I wrote to MSF on Jan 22 to lodge my complaints, it referred my case to the school and MOE, which handled it satisfactorily.

MOE also informed me that SCCs are bound by service-level agreements and are subject to routine checks. Taken together, the overlapping responsibilities and referral pathways are confusing for parents and create significant barriers to accountability.

Two urgent gaps need to be closed.

One, MSF and MOE do not collect evaluation data directly from parents. The guidelines encourage each SCC to conduct its own evaluation. The problems are obvious: There is a clear conflict of interest for an SCC to report negative findings about itself; no one else oversees the data’s integrity; and collecting data once a year, and often at the year end, is too late for timely or meaningful remedial action.

MOE/MSF should collect feedback from parents routinely and directly – a simple quarterly survey would suffice. This would reduce the administrative burden on schools, provide objective data to evaluate operator performance and promptly flag systemic problems within and across operators, and increase accountability for public funds disbursed to these operators.

Two, the direct GIRO deduction of student care fees by operators creates a vulnerability that this operator exploited.

It appears the operator systematically “tested the waters” to identify parents who do not scrutinise their statements. It would apologise and make a refund when an unauthorised deduction was discovered, and make deductions at varying times of the month, making it harder for parents to track charges.

 Issac Lim