Hi,fushiav wrote:Hi martyrmum,
Just to say we have enrolled our son in P1 last August and he has just started class last week in Queenstown Primary school. The whole process was a little bit stressful I admit, but so far it has worked out ok! One invaluable tool is a website called kiasuparents - once you have registered (it's free), you can get access to all the stats about vacancies at each stage of the process for each school, area by area and this for the past 3 years, so that you can see a trend, if a school is becoming more and more popular and vice versa. They also update it almost on a daily basis once the registration process has started. You can also get access to parents'forum for each school so you get a bit of an insight. There are also things like school's psle results etc.. Unfortunately the webiste does not provide information on which schools got oversubscribed in phase 3 but i am sure you can get that info from MOE.
By the way we have found the MOE to be very helpful on the phone whenever we had any question on the system or process.
Once you have identified schools that you might consider and which typically have some places available in phase 3, go and visit them as boffenl said. generally you only get a quick tour of the canteen and the sportsground, but the staff is generally friendly and you can ask questions, so that it gives you a feel for the place. Also make sure you go to their open days (I think most schools have theirs in May or June) as you get the meet the pupils and the teachers.
Oh and it may be early but you might want to make sure you have all the registration documentation ready in time (we realised a month before the process that our son did not have all the jabs needed - you need to gather all the immunisation records for instance...)
One piece of advice is to consider as many schools as you can stretch to geographically and get to know the schools before the registration process starts, as the schools available on the P3 registration day may not be the one you were looking for.
As the P3 phase is no longer a first come first serve process, i think it pays to wait until the afternoon - we called all the schools at lunch time to check how they were filling up, and ruled out for us schools which were definitely going get into ballotting.
There are very few Singaporeans or PRs in phase 3 - the bulk of phase 3 applicants would be expats, not just Caucasians but in fact the majority comes from other Asian countries (quite a few from China, Korea, Phillipines and Vietnam.
We have asked the school about the exemption for chinese, apparently it is not automatically granted when asked, they advised us to wait and see how our son is doing, and if his results are bad in Chinese but ok in other subjects, to apply for an exemption. I'd like him to continue to attend the classes in any event, as it would be invaluable language to have.
That's all for now but feel free to ask questions, happy to answer if i can!
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