SINGAPORE: SIM University (UniSIM) will host Singapore’s third law school, announced Education Minister Heng Swee Keat at UniSIM’s convocation ceremony on Wednesday morning.
This comes as the university, together with the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) is preparing to launch full-time degree courses from next year.
The idea for Singapore’s third law school was mooted earlier this year to address the shortage of criminal and family lawyers.
Minister for Education Heng Swee Keat said: “In selecting UniSIM, we considered its strong track record in the provision of degree programmes for mature individuals, and its complementary offerings in the social sciences and humanities.”
In the meantime, there is much the university has to do to in preparing to offer the new course.
Professor Cheong Hee Kiat, president of UniSIM, said: “ (We need to look at) the curriculum, how do we shape that bit of the programme that will enable the lawyers to come out to cater to that new needs, who do we get on board to teach, the kind of people who will be needed, who will be able to stress those areas.
“(We also need to look at) what broadening do we need to give to the lawyers, so that they have a broad view of the needs, of social needs, and so on.
“And then of course there are other things like how does the Ministry of Law, Ministry of Education come in to work with us to partner with us. How do we get the lawyers outside, the veterans, the people who know the systems to be able to help us with this.”
Mr Heng also said the new law school will have a strong applied curriculum.
Professor Cheong said: “We will still be training lawyers who will be able to be on par with the other lawyers trained by NUS and SMU, in terms of how they can qualify to the Bar.
“But I think apart from that, we want to give them a focus on the community, on social law, on criminal law, and various aspects that the Fourth Committee (on the Supply of Lawyers) had identified.”
Mr Heng said the Ministry of Law is now working with UniSIM to develop its programmes.
On his Facebook page, Law and Foreign Affairs Minister K Shanmugam said the new law school will provide Singaporeans interested in a career in law more opportunities and a new pathway to fulfil their career aspirations.
On Wednesday. Mr Heng also reiterated the government’s commitment to ensure Singaporeans have such opportunities to acquire new skills and knowledge.
And one such way is through the new full-time degree programmes at UniSIM and SIT, which will begin next year.
For a start, UniSIM and SIT will both offer up to about 200 places in their first intake next year.
And as Singapore’s fifth and sixth universities, Mr Heng said they will both develop their own specialisation.
SIT will have a niche in subjects related to science and technology, and in 2014, it will offer programmes in engineering, information communications technology and accountancy.
UniSIM will specialise in business and human and social services, and its full-time programmes will be in accountancy, finance and marketing.
The two universities will also offer a new applied learning programme with a strong focus on work attachment.
Mr Heng said: Some of you may be thinking, don’t our universities now already have work attachment programmes? Yes, they do and those will continue.
“How these work attachments differ is this — they will generally be longer and will offer a deeper immersion than current attachment programmes at our universities. This way, our students will be able to take on fuller, more meaningful projects at the organisations to which they are attached.”
Meanwhile, Professor Cheong said: “What we want to do is to bring some of the nice features of our part-time programme into our full-time programme, so that the students who come to us — they’re fresh school-leavers — they will get some of these things that have helped some of our part-timers.
“But at the same time, over time, I see that what we do with the full-time students, the preparation we give them to give into the workplace and so on, and the reflection we expect them to do once they’ve done their assignments for their attachments, will flow back into our part-timers because they also have things to learn.
“And when we put both into the classroom in some of the courses, we’ll have magic because the part-timers will learn from the full-timers, both of them will learn from our professors and our adjunct staff will come from the industry.”
The two universities are expected to release more details next week.
This week, some 2,000 students will receive their degrees over five sessions at the UniSIM’s eighth convocation.
Among them is the first batch of students from the Master of Gerontology course.
Ms Eunice Tan, who was a social worker in the eldercare field for 17 years, decided to take up the course as she felt her knowledge was inadequate.
She has a chemical process technology diploma and a social work degree.
Ms Eunice Tan, 45, the top student in her Gerontology course, said: “I think the networking with my colleagues, with my classmates really helped (me) get to know different people from the same field and enable me to meet up with people who are like-minded in this area of caring for elderly.
UniSIM to host Singapore"s third law school
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