Parents rely on infant care centres to fill in the learning and development gaps of their children, as well as support their social and emotional needs.
However, childcare in Singapore are not without their unique set of challenges. These problems could range from administrators being buried in tons of paperwork to teachers having a difficult time tracking the progress of each child.
We’ll talk about these challenges below to shed light on what childcare providers in Singapore deal with, alongside our suggestions on how to overcome them.
1. Keeping up with state standards and licensing
An infant care Singapore can’t operate without proper licensing and relevant accreditations. EduTrust Certification and Singapore Quality Class are two of the accreditations early childhood education centres need to acquire before accepting students.
Licences and accreditations mean that a centre meets the basic legal requirements to safely and effectively run programmes and activities for young children.
However, organising all the relevant paperwork and keeping track of the state requirements isn’t easy for most childcare centres in Singapore, especially the small ones.
As a solution, most infant care centres we know have started using digital tools to help them identify important files, store necessary documents, and track important dates.
2. Overwhelming amount of paperwork
The reality is, in most infant care centres in Singapore, teachers can’t avoid handling paperwork. Not a day goes by without teachers recording something on paper and having to keep it for documentation purposes.
Going through different forms of communication logs takes a lot of their time, which could have been spent looking after and playing with their students.
Teachers lose a lot of time by having to manually store and organise school paperwork. Not to mention that it’s the infant care centres that bear these financial and productivity costs.
Switching from paper to digital forms is the easiest solution. This would be convenient for every teacher and staff member as it would save them lots of hours per week printing papers and locating physical copies.
3. Trust and communication issues with parents
The biggest concern of any parent when looking for an infant care provider in Singapore is trust. How can parents trust the centre to provide their children with the supervision, attention, and care that they need?
It’s the responsibility of the centre to not only be transparent but also to communicate regularly with each parent. Parents always want to know how their child’s day was and every special thing they did.
However, regular communication with every parent isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially for small infant care centres. Teachers can only do so much when it comes to making sure that parents are fully updated.
Since it’s basically impossible to update each parent every day, some infant care Singapore opt to hold weekly meetings to give parents a chance to ask about their child’s progress.
4. Ensuring the safety of each child
The top priority of any childcare in Singapore is the safety, health, and well-being of children.
It goes without saying that these centres are safe places for children, but like anywhere else in the world over the past three years, dealing with the pandemic has proved a major challenge to most childcare centres.
We may be past the worst of the pandemic, but childcare centres still need to maintain a safe and healthy environment for their students, teachers, and support staff. This entails regular cleaning and monitoring of everyone’s temperature.