Crisis
Covid-19 planning and execution
The first case of novel coronavirus was confirmed in Jan 2020 in Singapore. We have over 3000 lives to safeguard at EtonHouse in Singapore. Our overseas partners were also looking to us for guidance.
Skills: Stakeholder management | Communication | Synthesizing information | Foresight | Critical thinking | Leadership | Resource management | Global citizenship | Adaptability
Challenges:
There was little to no Government and scientific guidance at the onset. We had to act fast because Singapore is a travel hub, travel restrictions were not in place and our parent community were predominantly expatriate in nature.
Learnings:
It’s important to secure our supply chain for essentials like surgical masks, thermometers and hand sanitisers before the expected price and supply volatility. We also decided on a tiered system with corresponding responses, documented on a Google site and disseminated internally to all school & HQ leadership so that we will be ready to respond if and when the situation escalates. Facebook workplace safety checks feature (a check-in feature that reaches out to all employees around the world to ask if they needed assistance) was also enabled to let employees know we were looking out for them.
Improvements:
Many of our global partners were not able to use our measures as-is but had to localise to their contexts. We were also unable to send over emergency supplies that we had procured due to the closure of borders.
Output:
Covid internal portal hosting epidemic response plan, media releases, government advisories, illness logs for children, visitors and vendors, parent communications, templates for risk assessment and travel declarations, educational resources and media guidelines.
Covid-19 Circuit Breaker Home-Based Learning
Singapore’s sudden announcement of the circuit breaker and subsequent extension left many schools ill-prepared for the sudden transition to home-based learning.
Skills: Stakeholder management | Communication | Technical support | Resource management | Capacity building | Adaptability | Critical thinking
Challenges:
EtonHouse’s pedagogy and curriculum is heavily dependent on physical attendance in school. This skewed the demographics and skillsets of our teaching staff unfavourably for distance learning.
Learnings:
Bringing together and training a core team to provide technical and non-technical support for our teachers and parents helped to ease the abrupt transition. Daily huddles also helped us to preemptively identify weak links in our distance learning implementation for timely resolution.
Improvements:
Contingency planning did not include distance learning as an option because we incorrectly assessed that the Government will keep schools open to ensure the availability of essential services in Singapore.
Output:
We provided live chat that can be escalated to video calls for our parents. We provided online training for video editing, video calls best practices, portable internet routers/replacement devices and chat groups that can be escalated to video calls for our teachers to maximize the quality of the delivery of distance learning.