Dear Parents,

As many of you will be aware, this afternoon Prime Minister Lee announced that Singapore’s circuit breaker is now extended until 1 June. While this was not the news that any of us were hoping for, we support the government in its efforts to do what’s right.

The implications for our student, staff and parent community are significant. Leadership teams are going into a series of meetings tomorrow to make some key decisions about how best to respond. We will continue to refer to our two guiding principles outlined to you in our previous message: 

• We must provide continuity of education for our students, applying everything we know about best practice in remote learning, while continuing to adapt and change according to student, parent and teacher feedback.

• We are a united community and will do our best to take care of each other emotionally, practically and financially, while ensuring the sustainability of the College for future generations.

I know many of you will have questions about what the extension will mean for what remains of this school year, the summer break currently scheduled to start on 19 June and the start of the new school year, planned for 24 August. We will be looking closely at the implications of continued home-based learning over this extended period, taking into account the feedback already received and our responsibilities to the parent community. We will also be looking at what this means for our boarding community in particular, and thinking about the long-term sustainability of the College. We will commit to answering your questions as soon as we are able and will communicate further in due course.

In the meantime, please send any questions that cannot wait to uwcsea@uwcsea.edu.sg. We also hope you will send any suggestions you have to the same address. That will allow us to consolidate all the urgent concerns and ideas in one place and keep the principals and other senior leaders focused on important decision-making and on taking care of the students and staff.

In the words of the Singapore government “the health of all depends on each one of us" and the same is true of a school community. We are all in this together, weathering the same storm.
There is no doubt that there is more uncertainty ahead, but our community is strong and resilient. I am reminded of Kurt Hahn’s statement “there is more in you than you think”; this is particularly true in responding to continued uncertainty. Over the last few months, we have all seen that there is more in all of us, as part of this community, than we could ever have imagined. I hope we will all continue to pull together and take care of each other as we face the next set of challenges together.

Yours sincerely,

Carma Elliot CMG OBE
College President