Abstract
The power of education is far-reaching and universal, impacting people’s capacity for adaptation in our world today. Singapore’s dearth of natural resources necessitates a strong reliance on its skilled labor force, making education an especially important investment for this nation. Singapore’s education system has been lauded for its successful outcomes, but the same success cannot be said for its early childhood system. Greater awareness toward the extensive importance of early childhood care and education (ECCE) has called for heightened efforts to holistically develop the sector in order to adequately prepare our children for the future. At this juncture, it is beneficial to understand early childhood development (ECD) with systematic thinking and connectivity to truly bring about transformation. In this chapter, we propose the honeycomb of early childhood development (ECD) to drive research, practice, and policies in ECD. It comprises six important factors: 1) economics, where we talk about ECD as an investment that is practical for our economy and beneficial for children when done early and strategically; 2) equity, where the importance of enabling access to ECCE for every child is highlighted; 3) essence, where we consider ECCE as a crucial phase of life that every child is entitled to; 4) education, where we discuss the types of curriculum and pedagogies that need to be incorporated together; 5) educators, where the role of preschool teachers, teacher education, and teacher policies are discussed; and 6) ecology, where the relevance of various stakeholders and parties in ECD is brought to attention.
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Notes
- 1.
Examples include: setting up the National Institute of Early Childhood Development (NIE) (Lee, 2017), increasing government-funded preschool places, installing comprehensive preschool facilities, improving mean-tested subsidies, and doubling annual spending on early childhood sector to more than S$2 billion per year from 2020 onwards (Yang, 2020).
- 2.
For example, the cerebellum, which is mainly responsible for motor control such as movement and balance, grows rapidly in the first few months after birth; the hippocampus and amygdala, responsible for memory and emotion, grows substantially in early years; the prefrontal cortex, responsible for higher order processes like planning and regulation, continues to grow even in adolescence.
- 3.
A research program by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) which ranked preschool environments in 45 countries (Economic Intelligence Unit, 2012)
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Tan, O.S., Chua, J.J.E. (2022). The Honeycomb of Early Childhood Development (ECD): A Big Picture Approach for Supporting Development and Education for Early Years. In: Tan, O.S., Poon, K.K., O’Brien, B.A., Rifkin-Graboi, A. (eds) Early Childhood Development and Education in Singapore . Empowering Teaching and Learning through Policies and Practice: Singapore and International Perspectives, vol 2. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7405-1_2
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