SINGAPORE: The Education Minister announced that Junior Colleges will not move to a single March intake next year as originally planned.
But this is only temporary, until 2008 when the Ministry hopes to move to a single intake in January.
Junior Colleges will now have to plan for students to be in college from January to March but many were doing so anyway because of the Integrated Programme, and students are looking forward to the January orientation programmes.
"With the injection of JC students, it'll be a bigger cohort and the IP students get to interact with the JC students." said Ho Zi Wei, a 2nd year student from the Integrated Programme at National Junior College.
Most of the Junior Colleges spoken to said the postponement of the Single Intake posed no administrative difficulties, because they could easily revert to what they had been doing for years.
"We have a lot of enrichment programmes, we can always use these enrichment programmes for another occasion and perhaps during the vacation. We've come up with a model on how we can have enrichment programmes around the year. For IP students they're not much affected because we have enrichments anyway. For the JC students, we pace it in because of the new change, in anticipation for better things to come!" said Virginia Cheng, the Principal of National Junior College.
Principals and parents say a Single Intake in January is worth waiting for since it synchronises the school year.
"We thought it's a good thing to delay, because with the delay we can focus on getting a better system in a few years' time. And then we can now focus on implementing the new curriculum. It's better to wait rather than have constant changes. If you keep on changing the timing I think it's very disruptive." added Ms Cheng.
This was echoed by secondary schools - even those like CHIJ St Nicholas and Anglo-Chinese in Barker Road - which were originally going to bring forward their prelims.
Now they will re-strategise their time-tables to make sure students also ace their prelims.
"The school curriculum, of course in terms of revision with the kids, we will have to move things a little bit earlier, for the prelims as well as thereafter for the 'O' levels. But no scramble otherwise! " said Ng Eng Chin, Principal of Anglo-Chinese (Barker Road).
Asked on Thursday at an event, the Education Minister said he believes the Ministry can re-engineer the whole system and put in the single January intake in future. - CNA