Closing the Gap

Mint Lim, the first Singaporean fellow of the Cartier Women's Initiative, on creating a learning centre where no child is left behind.

- LYNETTE KOH

When enrichment schools toot their own horns, they typically highlight how many distinctions their students achieve in exams. However, for Mint Lim , the founder of School of Concepts, success is about a lot more than just high test scores.

Ask the social entrepreneur to share her enrichment centre’s success stories, and she will tell you about students such as a boy with serious autism who joined the school at the age of three. When he first arrived, Lim recalls, the only word he could verbalise was “stop”. He was also unable to make eye contact with others. However, after a year at School of Concepts, his language skills improved greatly, and he was able to better articulate his feelings as well as socialise.

Like this boy, another of Lim’s students comes from a troubled family background. Five years ago, Lim happened to strike up a conversation with a private-hire car driver when she was his passenger. He shared that his daughter, who would be entering primary school the following year, could not speak or write a word of English.

When she first entered School of Concepts, the child was not able to say much, save for a colourful vocabulary of Hokkien expletives. She also had other behavioural challenges stemming from neglect.

Initially, Lim worked one-on-one with the child — at a subsidised flat rate — using the school’s visual/auditory/kinesthetic (VAK) approach before gradually easing her into group classes. Today, that student is 13 years old and has improved tremendously — not only academically but also in personal development.

A VISION REAFFIRMED