Has anyone been able to negotiate local+ education allowance offer?

[maybeSing2017]

Home schooling seems to be catching on, at least reading the variously blogs, forums gives you the sense it is. I am biased and seem to have a mental block about the idea, maybe time to change

On a separate note. How long should we budget to move, 2 months minimum?

[maybeSing2017]

Thank you v. much. Your views and insights have been extremely helpful. We are still sorting through the maze of information.

No worries. I'm sorry that the flood gates opened on you. Singapore has been my obsession for the last month as I try to figure out how we're going to survive here. So I end up brain dumping all over people at any opportunity.

Please continue, its hugely helpful as we are in a very similar predicament.

[PNGMK]

I don't think you need an exemption for an expat child on a dependant's pass - am I wrong about that?

From what I know of yes. All children need to be educated in Singapore from 7. If you don't tell the MOE you're home schooling they will assume the child is not being educated.

I know a few familes doing homeschooling and they have all mentioned this requirement.

[lagimoana]

It's good to treat homeschooling as a major undertaking and to be cautious about it. It isn't for everyone. It wasn't for us, the first time we tried it. And it may not be for us this time, either.

Most homeschoolers I know have slipped behind national standards in Australia. We're going to use a curriculum, Sonlight. It's Christian but the science and maths components are secular. It's just that the English literature component includes Bible study. They offer a completely secular alternative, BookShark - but BookShark doesn't ship to Singapore.

Two months is a great amount of time to budget. We had much less, because the background checks took so long. The team were desperate to have my husband on the floor working though, and he really wanted the job. So he gave the mobility team a date about six weeks away and they booked the flights. But it wasn't confirmed until three weeks before our departure. So we had three weeks to pack up the house and relocate, which was in my opinion stupid and ridiculous, and now we're here in this situation.

Don't do that to your wife and child!!!

I would suck up the cost of having things packed professionally, too. We did that when we moved from New Zealand to Australia - because we had a 1 week old newborn (we moved when he was 2 weeks old. Yeah...I've been through too much of this already!!). It was so much easier.

This time we tried to do everything ourselves and put everything in storage and used it as an opportunity to declutter, so freecycled and sold a lot of stuff, and with only three weeks it was just a debacle to be honest. I wish we'd just hired people to pack everything, even the crap we didn't really want (like they did the last time) and saved ourselves the stress.

In retrospect I would have demanded that the flights be booked after the the background checks were complete. Little things can make the process drag on. For my husband, they needed confirmation from a particular line manager he had, who had since moved on to a different company and relocated to New York and was very difficult to contact.

How old is your child? Mine are at a reasonable age to homeschool because they're 11 and 8, and can already read and write confidently, so they can make their own way through workbooks and worksheets, etc. They're also boffins by nature - at the moment, even though I don't require them to do anything, the 11 year old is working on a children's picture book that he's written, and the 8 year old is creating a Diary of Singapore Adventures journal.

At kindy/grade 1 age, it's much harder, because you're teaching a child to read, and teaching basic facts in maths, like numbers and addition/subtraction. Mine are well over all of that now and also better able to deal with the frustrations of learning.

It does offer some amazing opportunities. I think I will give them each a 'passion project' for the year, something to research and learn a lot about - they can choose anything they want. One might choose Ancient Greek gods and goddesses, and the other might choose medical machinery - those are their interests off the top of my head. As a reward at the end of the year, I could give them an overseas trip to something relevant to their project. I think that would be a really memorable learning experience, and something that can't be replicated in an institutional setting. It might make up for all the socialising they're going to miss out on by being at home.

[lagimoana]

I don't think you need an exemption for an expat child on a dependant's pass - am I wrong about that?

From what I know of yes. All children need to be educated in Singapore from 7. If you don't tell the MOE you're home schooling they will assume the child is not being educated.

I know a few familes doing homeschooling and they have all mentioned this requirement.

I just checked with the SG homeschooling FB group, and they say no exemption is needed for expat kids...

[PNGMK]

I don't think you need an exemption for an expat child on a dependant's pass - am I wrong about that?

From what I know of yes. All children need to be educated in Singapore from 7. If you don't tell the MOE you're home schooling they will assume the child is not being educated.

I know a few familes doing homeschooling and they have all mentioned this requirement.

I just checked with the SG homeschooling FB group, and they say no exemption is needed for expat kids...

I may be muddled then - we have a Sing Citizen child and we definitely would need exemption...

[MikeJones]

From what I know of yes. All children need to be educated in Singapore from 7. If you don't tell the MOE you're home schooling they will assume the child is not being educated.

I know a few familes doing homeschooling and they have all mentioned this requirement.

I just checked with the SG homeschooling FB group, and they say no exemption is needed for expat kids...

I may be muddled then - we have a Sing Citizen child and we definitely would need exemption...

From this link it looks like compulsory education only applies to children who are Singapore Citizens
https://www.moe.gov.sg/education/educat ... -education

Mike