1. This House would be familiar with the tragic case of Megan Khung. She died in February 2020, after months of abuse by her mother and her mother’s boyfriend.
2. All the agencies concerned – MSF Child Protective Service, the Early Childhood Development Agency (ECDA), the Singapore Police Force, Beyond Social Services and HEART@Fei Yue Child Protection Specialist Centre accept the Review Panel’s findings in full. There were opportunities to pick up on the abuse, which might have prevented Megan's death. Our responses clearly fell short.
3. As Minister Masagos and I had said on 23 October, MSF is the lead for the national child protection ecosystem. On behalf of all the agencies and organisations concerned, we are deeply sorry for the outcome, the lapses at the Child Protective Service and the Singapore Police Force, as well as the missed opportunities at ECDA. We should have done much better.
4. Mr Speaker, our social workers confront the pain of child abuse cases every day. Their emotional burden of separating parents and children and managing cases resulting in tragic outcomes is a heavy one, which they have chosen to bear. To our social workers, thank you for your commitment to protecting vulnerable children. Let us carry this burden together, as a sector and society.
a. We do not and should not intervene unnecessarily. Families encountering the child protection system often find the experience stressful. They may be questioned by teachers, healthcare professionals, social workers and the Police, which can feel intrusive and accusatory, especially if eventually no abuse is found.
b. Social workers aim for a collaborative relationship with the families they work with. They support parents to care for their children, intervening only when the child is at risk.
c. When there are reasonable grounds to believe that a child is in need of care and protection, the law empowers child protection officers to step in, to implement safety plans or even remove the child from the home, and from the family.
6. Protecting children requires society’s collective effort. We depend on neighbours, friends, and relatives to offer help to parents facing caregiving stress, and to report suspected abuse by calling the National Anti-Violence and Sexual Harassment Helpline (NAVH). Alongside them, preschools, schools, hospitals, healthcare institutions, and social service agencies also play critical roles in identifying abuse.
7. Over the years, MSF and our partners have worked to strengthen the child protection ecosystem. Megan’s death five years ago had already prompted further enhancements to protocols. The system has evolved since then. But there is still much more that can be done.
8. My response to Members’ questions will be in three parts – first, enhancing frontline capability, second, strengthening systems and oversight, and third, responding to the Panel’s recommendations.
9. Let me start with frontline capability. We will enhance frontline capability and empower professionals who are our first line of defence.
a. In particular, we will continue to manage practitioner workload and ensure social workers are adequately resourced. The risk of burnout is real and it is difficult to attract and retain people in child protection work.
b. Over the past three years, the average caseload ratio for the sector has been fairly stable, at around 18 to 21 cases per worker. But the variation across centres is significant, ranging between 12 to 30 cases per worker.
c. For the Child Protective Service, now known as Protective Service (PSV), we have doubled our Child Protection Officers from around 45 in 2019 to more than 90 in 2024, and we are continuing to expand. The additional resources have helped bring the average caseload per officer down from around 40, to 35 today.
d. We have also redesigned the job to reduce the workload on our Protection Officers. Support staff were brought in and services were outsourced to handle ancillary tasks and augment resourcing for critical work. This enables Protection Officers to focus on social investigations and supervision.
10. We will continue to step up training and competency development, to give practitioners the skill and the confidence to detect child abuse and make sound decisions that keep children safe.
d. To better identify child abuse, we are also studying analytic tools to help us connect the dots and see trends across agencies. This allows us to target our efforts on higher risk cases. But we have to carefully validate these tools to avoid excessive false positives, which could overwhelm the system, and to avoid reinforcing stereotypes.
d. I would also like to address a concern about reporting thresholds. Members can be assured that the role of those making a report is simply to flag concerns. It is the job of the social workers to support parents who may be struggling with caregiving, and the job of the Police and child protection specialists to ascertain if abuse has occurred.
13. The second set of issues raised by Members touch on how we will strengthen our systems and oversight.
b. Today, PSV conducts periodic practice reviews with external consultants to assess whether officers have made accurate case assessments and complied with protocols. We intend to further strengthen our quality assurance framework by increasing the frequency of practice reviews and expanding the audit scope. MSF will implement the enhanced measures by 2026.
15. Several Members suggested having more centralised coordination and data integration. Indeed, MSF will be setting up a new social services coordination centre, supported by technology. It will help us to better detect, sense-make and connect the dots for cases from different touchpoints, such as the social services, education, community and other sectors.
16. We are also working to improve protocols and coordination with the Police for missing children, something that was mentioned by Mr Victor Lye.
d. The new social services coordination centre, which I mentioned earlier, will also provide tighter links to the Police’s operations.
17. Finally, let me address questions from Members on the Government’s response to the Panel’s recommendations.
• And providing more structured support for social service practitioners.
We will consult and work closely with the social sector to implement the recommendations progressively and complete the implementation by end-2026.
19. Some of our responses to the Panel’s recommendations have already been set out earlier in my reply, for example the establishment of a social services coordination centre, the use of analytic tools and technology to track cases, and working with agencies which are not child protection case management agencies to surface cases to child protection case management agencies, so that we can handle them. I will briefly set out our responses to the other recommendations.
a. This has to be done quite quickly. MSF will set up a Triage Assessment Panel by the first quarter of 2026, to do this, and determine which agency is best placed to manage the case.
a. We agree. By early next year, preschools will report such cases directly to the NAVH.
a. Since 2020, MSF has put in place formal protocols for cases where a child is unsighted or missing. There is now a common understanding within the sector that anyone can make a police report of a missing child. But we will continue raising public awareness and understanding on this issue, such as through the “Break the Silence” campaign.
a. In the past, MSF would carry out bilateral reviews of incidents with the relevant social service agency. In future, all deaths of children known to social services will be independently reviewed, with lessons shared across the sector. We will consult with the sector on how best to do this.
b. To enable this, MSF will set up a Protection Practitioners Care Fund to implement capability building and well-being initiatives for protection practitioners. Further details will be announced next year.
• MSF will continue to engage and work closely with stakeholders to strengthen our internal systems and communication across agencies.
26. We must carefully calibrate our efforts even as we do more. Protocols and structured tools are important, but they should guide – not replace – critical thinking and judgement. We must never reduce child protection work, or vulnerable protection work, to a mere checkbox system. Instead, we need to build trust and relationships over and on top of existing systems and procedures – between parents, the community, social services, and the Government.
27. As individuals, and as a society, let us look out for those who may be struggling. Parents, caregivers who need support in parenting can turn to our community and social service agencies for help and guidance.
28. Each time a tragedy like Megan’s occurs, we feel anger, sorrow and regret. Whether we are members of society or social work professionals, we must work together and do our utmost to protect our children.