About NTUC First Campus
As part of Labour Movement’s efforts in supporting working families in Singapore, NTUC First Campus (NFC) embarked on a journey of humble beginnings with the establishment of childcare centres in 1977 under the brand of NTUC Childcare. Four decades on, NFC continues to thrive in the early childhood sector making a positive mark in the lives of children and partnering working families in Singapore. Our vision is to be a thought and practice leader in the development and care of young children, partnering working families in every Singapore neighbourhood.
Today, we have achieved over 20,000 childcare enrolment across more than 160 pre-schools in Singapore. We have 3 pre-school brands, My First Skool, Little Skool House International and The Caterpillar’s Cove fulfilling the different needs of parents. We also own a Student Care brand, Afterschool, with 8 primary school based centers.
One of our pre-school brand, My First Skool, was a pioneer batch of pre-schools selected under the Anchor Operator (AO) scheme since 2009 with requirements to meet stringent KPI around expansion, keeping fees affordable and meeting the quality standards in early education. A key business objectives for NFC is its planned growth trajectory towards 2025 to reach 35,000 enrolment, in addition to fulfilling KPI as AO.
We believe that by keeping our focus on achieving our growth through our planned business and people strategies, having good workplace policies and practices, we can progress forward together as a strong body to meet the business outcomes we set for ourselves.
NFC Workplace Policies and Practices
In NTUC First Campus, our people strategy is committed to provide a fruitful and rewarding career, as articulated through our Employee Value Propositions. We also believe that by keeping our focus on achieving our growth through our planned business and people strategies, having good workplace policies and practices, we can progress forward together as a strong body to meet the business outcomes we set for ourselves.
Learn and Grow – We provide a myriad of opportunities to develop your competencies and enhance your career growth through enculturation, curriculum training and professional development, scholarships and sponsorships, leadership development programmes and learning journeys.
Enculturation: We assimilate new employees into understanding and learning our company vision, beliefs, culture and practices on why we do what we do to harness a communal synergy within the organisation.
Curriculum Training: We provide training and on-site mentoring on our curriculum to enable our teachers to provide an enriching learning experience for our children.
Sponsorships & Scholarships: We are committed in fulfilling the desire of our employees to attain higher professional qualifications at diploma, degree and master’s levels. As a mark of our commitment, we provide scholarships and sponsorships for employees who fit the pre-requisites and eligibility criterion.
Continuing Professional Development: We have a developmental roadmap for employees to take charge of their own learning and growth through enrolment in relevant professional courses based on their internal interest.
In-House Leadership Development Programme: We believe in nurturing leaders within our organisation. Through our, ‘Centre Core Team Model’, we actively grow and strengthen our teachers through intentional platforms. This opens up the opportunity for them step up as mentors, develop them professionally and consistently across our centres and eventually groom them to become future leaders.
Learning Journeys and Overseas Conferences: We believe in a continuous learning approach as there are good overseas practices outside that we can emulate, learn, adopt and implement within our organisation. We also do provide sponsorship to our employees to undergo these learning journeys and conferences.
Inspire and Be Inspired – We continue to inspire one another through our constant internal engagement with employees.
CEO Awards: We recognize nominated employees or teams who has been an inspiration to others through this award.
Valued and Be Valued – We have been an industry advocate on rewards and recognition. This includes advocating for fair pay levels of educators that commensurate. Internally, we provide Total Rewards which also covers staff benefits and development.
Enjoy – We, as a caring community of early childhood educators and education professionals, empower our employees by encouraging them to create magical moments together.
HappyYay! Movement – We believe in celebration of key milestones as a whole organization and supporting our staff to enable and to energize them. We have a holistic engagement plan to bring together for all our staff to have a common goal.
Positive NFC Outcomes
Our overall sustainable engagement score was 84%, which was 10 percentage point above the Singapore National Norm and 7 percentage point above Education Norm. This survey was based on Towers Watson methodology. It measures across 5 categories of Leadership, Trust, Respect and Empowerment. Sustainable engagement, as explained by Willis Towers Watson, was the intensity of employees’ connection to their organisation, based on 3 core elements, being Engaged, Enabled and Energised.
A high sustainable engagement score has impact on driving performance. Hence, it is in the interest of NFC to ensure we continue to have a high sustainable engagement score of the organisation.
Our overall retention rate of 86% to date is also evident that we continue to do well in our internal policies and practices to benefit our employees.
Within the sector, our educators are also recognised at national platform with achieving 10 out of 18 Early Childhood Development Agency (ECDA) awards in 2018.
