The Early Childhood Development Agency (ECDA) appointed three new Pre-School Anchor Operators today.

Metropolitan YMCA’s MY World Preschool, Kinderland Consortiums-Skool4Kidz, and EtonHouse International’s E-Bridge Pre-school will join PAP Community Foundation and NTUC First Campus’ My First Skool as Anchor Operators for the early childhood sector. Details on the Anchor Operators are in Annex A.

First introduced in 2009, the Anchor Operator scheme provides funding support to selected operators to increase access to good quality and affordable early childhood care and education, especially for children from lower income or disadvantaged backgrounds.

The call for proposals for new Anchor Operators opened in June 2013. ECDA received a total of 16 proposals.  These proposals were evaluated on a range of criteria, including financial stability, governance processes, programme quality and affordability, and the ability to increase capacity. Details on the evaluation criteria are in Annex B.

The three new Anchor Operators were selected based on their track record and proposals. They demonstrated commitment and ability to meet the demand for early childhood services, offer good quality and affordable programmes, expand outreach to low income families, and provide sector leadership in manpower development.

All five anchor operators are appointed for a tenure of five years. Collectively, they are expected to provide around 16,000 additional preschool places by 2017.

Minister for Social and Family Development, Mr. Chan Chun Sing, said: “With more Anchor Operators on board, we can better serve the needs of our children and families. The fees will be affordable to parents as the anchor operators must keep to programme fee caps. The operators have also committed to help children from lower income or disadvantaged backgrounds through corporate social responsibility programmes.”

Senior Minister of State for Education, Ms. Indranee Rajah, added: “With more anchor operators, parents can look forward to a wider range of good quality and affordable pre-school programmes for their children. The early childhood sector as a whole will benefit from the unique strengths of each of our five Anchor Operators, and teachers too can look forward to good development opportunities.”

ANNEX A

PRE-SCHOOL ANCHOR OPERATORS

ANNEX B

EVALUATION CRITERIA

The Proposer’s proposal was evaluated and considered in accordance with the following criteria:

1. Extent of compliance with the components of the Call for Proposals documents;
2. Understanding of the Requirement Specifications, and ability to meet the Requirement Specifications;
3. Track record for providing quality early childhood care and education services;
4. Track record for governance and regulatory compliance;
5. Track record for financial stability;
6. Quality of proposed programmes and services;
7. Total proposed grant amounts requested from the Government;
8. Proposed fee schedules for services; and
9. Proposed number of places/centres to be provided.