Unregistered daycare centres urged to register for monitoring and support

Senior minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob urged unregistered daycare centres to register with the Ministry of Women, Family, and Community Development.

This is to help the ministry's monitoring efforts amidst the Covid-19 outbreak. The centres will also receive proper training.

"I call on these private daycare centres, even if they only have three to four customers, to register with the Women, Family, and Community Development Ministry, so they can get proper training, likely for free," Ismail (above) said.

"Because they are unregistered, it's difficult to monitor them in terms of standard operating procedure (SOP)," said the minister during his daily press conference in Putrajaya today.

At the moment, he urged those daycare centres to download the SOP from the ministry or welfare department's website.

Earlier, Ismail said the government is concerned with these unregistered daycare centres in case anything untoward happened to the children enrolled there.

Meanwhile, on the topic of certain private schools charging fees despite them being closed, Ismail said such acts are unethical.

"When there's no service provided, they shouldn't ask for a fee.

"Just like school buses. We told them that they cannot collect fees as students don't go to school, so why do they (schools) want to collect fees?" Ismail asked.

He said that even if the schools are facing financial constraints, so are the parents.

"So I hope these schools don't take the opportunity to force parents to pay fees although their children don't go to school," he said.

There's no date yet for the reopening of schools but the newly released guidelines stated only Form Five and Form Six students will be allowed to return back to classes. - Mkini